So… Jack is a nickname for John. As in Jack Kennedy.
But people are named Jack at birth. And most nicknames are diminutives (not all, of course).
So, how come a person baptized John (Kennedy) is refered to as Jack?
And related - Why are the Kennedy’s refered to as Camelot?
Behind The Name says that Jack is from Jackin, which is a medieval pet form of John. Now, what’s a “pet form”?
Basis or no, it just doesn’t seem right.
- Patty (just call me Paul)
I’m going to go with a French influence here…
Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques
Dormez vous? Dormez vous?
“Jacque,” like “John,” (or “Johann,” etc,) is a transliteration of the Hebrew Yochanan – the emphasis is just on different phonemes.
Jacques, dammit. I always do that. Bad Canadian.
Jack supposedly liked the musical, and Jackie made sure Theodore H. White used a quote from it in a Life magazine article memorializing him.
“Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.”
No, it isn’t.
John comes from Ioannes - ultimately from Yochanan.
Jaques comes from Iacobus - from Ya’aqov. Other names from the root are Jacob and James.
Ioannes and Iacobus as the latin versions, of course.
No. Jacques is from Latin Jacobus, from Greek Iakobos, from Hebrew Ya‘qob. The English form of Jacobus is James.
I see how Jack could have been derived from Jankin, a Middle English diminutive of John, with the Low German diminutive suffix -kin. In the Wife of Bath’s Tale, one of her ex-husbands was named Jankin. The guy whose favorite book was that fictional misogynist classic The Boke of Wikked Wyves — fit only for the fireplace.
Whoopsie. Thank you, Johanna.
People are named “Jon” at birth as well. Plenty of given names nowadays started out as nicknames.
On a side note: sometimes given names are given with the hope that a standard nickname will catch on. My standard nickname never stuck, and coincidentally I never became much of an “all-American boy” either.
My dad has been called Jack all his life. But his given name is Henry. My grandpa must have had some sense of humor, as the nickname was always attributed to him.
I always thought that Jack, and John, both basically just referred to a Man. The link is simply they’re two names that mean the same thing.
Perhaps that’s not the case.
But, but…
Seeing that Jack and John have different roots, what’s the reasoning behind calling John “Jack” ( is it ever the other way around?)? This isn’t just some quirk from a parent with a sense of humor.
Thanks for the Camelot answer.
Patty O’Furniture has already answered the question of how John can become Jack. It’s from the Middle English diminutive form Jankin. Originally Jan (a form of John, as in Dutch) + -kin (a Low German diminutive, also seen in Dutch words like manikin). Jankin was Middle English for Johnny. The only thing that still needs explaining is how the -n- in the middle dropped out. This might possibly be explained by the tendency in some languages, in some situations, to lose n before a consonant. In Hebrew this is a regular pattern. In Hebrew, the loss of -n- resulted in a compensatory lengthening of the consonant after it. Compare: Arabic anta, Hebrew attah ‘thou’. Arabic sunbulah, Hebrew shibboleth ‘ear of grain’.
Jack has, understandably, become confused with the French name Jacques, which is really Jacob or James.
My grandfather immigrated from Sicily in 1920, and although his original name was Vincenzo, for some reason he changed it to James upon becoming an American citizen. It was explained to me when I was a child that James was the English translation of Vincenzo. Anyone could see that it is no such thing! It’s a totally different name. I remained puzzled even after I met another woman whose Sicilian immigrant grandfather had changed his name from Vincenzo to James, and given the same explanation. WTF? 
A guy at our school was christened “Jack,” his nickname was “John.” 
My father’s name was Jack; it was Jack on his birth certificate; he was never know by anything other than Jack.
But whenever someone wanted to sound “formal,” e.g. addressing an invitation, the name “John” reared its ugly head. It always bugged the hell out of my father.
When he died, the paper changed the name in his obituary to John; they had to reprint it.
“For one bright shining moment, we all came…a lot!”
Same thing here. Quite a few people assume that my name is “Jon” short for “Jonathan”, when it’s actually “John”. Caused me no end of disciplinary writeups in school when I insistently corrected my teachers and got angry when they refused to call me by my name.