cognomen

Other forms of cognomen

plural

cognomina

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about cognomen

What does cognomen mean?

cognomen means "a familiar name for a person (often a shortened version of a person's given name)". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in cognomen?

cognomen has 3 syllables and divides as cog-no-men under the regular spelling rules. It is not in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, so that comes from how the word is written rather than from a recorded pronunciation, and no stress or phonetic transcription is claimed for it.

What is another word for cognomen?

Close synonyms include nickname, moniker, sobriquet, soubriquet, byname. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is cognomen a common word?

cognomen is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.