A character, a place, or an object is known by a name/nickname that's actually a corrupted version of the name they normally go by.
This can happen for a bunch of reasons:
- Phonetic/Oral Corruption: A character has amnesia and cannot fully recall their name, or a name is misheard or mispronounced by others—often because it is foreign or difficult for locals to say.
- Visual/Textual Corruption: A name is adopted from a damaged or incomplete source, such as a broken road sign, a smudged name tag, or a fractured artifact where certain letters are missing or illegible. This is common in Future Imperfect settings where the original language or context has been lost to time, which can also be used as a twist later in the story if the real identity is significant.
- Improvisation: The character is simply bad at coming up with a name on the fly and uses a mangled version of something else.
Supertrope of:
- Acronyms Are Easy as Aybeecee: The name is an acronym that doesn't translate to a proper word.
- Lazy Alias: The fake name is a vaguely changed version of the real name.
- Mondegreen: The name of something is misheard and the wrong form is passed on.
- Naturalized Name: Someone's name is deliberately altered upon arrival in a new country.
- Numbers 2 Names: Numbers in identifications are turned into alphabetic letters.
- Sue Donym: A character becomes known by a mangled or otherwise altered version of their real name.
Related tropes:
- Funetik Aksent: A name is badly mangled when spoken with a foreign accent.
- Mistaken for Name: Characters humorously misunderstand or misinterpret cues or phrases as names.
- Signs of Disrepair: A name comes from people not familiar with the original reading a busted sign identifying them/it.
Unrelated tropes:
- Meaningful Rename: A character chooses their own new name that is completely different from the old one and feels more appropriate to them.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- Delicious in Dungeon: When Laios first met Toshiro, he misheard Toshiro's name as "Shuro" and kept calling him that, and the rest of the party apparently thought it was his real name and started using it also. For some reason, Toshiro never corrected them until much later after he had left the party and then met them again. Toshiro clearly did not like Laios' accidental misnaming, so there is a great deal of fan speculation about why Toshiro did not correct Laios' mistake while they were dungeon crawling together. Ultimately, the series never really explains, though it seems to hint quite broadly that Toshiro felt constrained by a combination of easterner cultural politeness and a rather severe anxiety disorder.
- DieBuster: The main protagonist, Nono, is named after the first thing she said upon being found out in deep space, "Nonoriri", a mysterious concept she wants to become. In actuality, both "Nonoriri" and "Nono" are corruptions of what her discoverers barely heard her stammer out: "Noriko".
- EDENS ZERO: This gets combined with Say My Name when revealing how Demon King Ziggy got his name. He's actually the future version of Shiki, his own adoptive grandson, who was so horribly injured at the time that he struggled to say his name, mangling it as "Zhigi". Shiki realized the connection and uttered Ziggy's name with such total clarity that onlookers mistook it for his name, with his physical condition and fading memories keeping him from correcting the mistake.
- In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Steel Ball Run, one of the first characters introduced is the Native American runner, Sandman. He later reveals that his real name is Soundman, the former name being assigned to him for the titular race by its organizers.
- In One Piece the legendary Pirate King Gold Roger is later revealed to have been named Gol D. Roger. The World Government intentionally changed his name to bury his association with the mysterious "Will of D".
- The island where the titular treasure is located is known as "Raftel" by most. Its true name, given by Gol D. Roger himself when he discovered it, is "Laugh Tale".
- Puella Magi Madoka Magica: Kyubey's name/title is eventually revealed to be "Incubator".
- Rave Master: The Demon Card, the main antagonists of the series, got their name from an accidental misspelling on a sign as it was suppose to be "Demon Guard" but the sign lost the "u" and "r" and most of the "G" got rubbed away. The founders Gale Glory and Gale Raregroove, decided to just run with it.
- Spirited Away:
- Yubaba the witch uses enchanted contracts to keep workers in her service; as a sign of their imprisonment, she literally steals employees' names by lifting the kanji from the contracts into her hand. We see this firsthand with Chihiro; after she signs her name, Yubaba takes all of it but a single character—"Sen"—and forces everyone to use that word to refer to her. The theft of someone's name even affects the employee's memory, and it's revealed that if they forget their own name completely, they'll be trapped under Yubaba's control forever, unable to return home.
- Chihiro/Sen's guide in the spirit world is a young man who is only known as Haku; he also had his name stolen by Yubaba and has already lost his full memory of it. On the way back from visiting Yubaba's sister, who gives her a protective hairband, Chihiro/Sen remembers an incident where she almost drowned in the Kohaku River trying to retrieve her shoe, only to somehow be lifted to the riverbank. She realizes that Haku is the one who saved her and restores his name: it's "Nigihayami Kohaku Nushi" (in the original Japanese version) or "Kohaku River" (in the English dub).
Audio Plays
- Big Finish Doctor Who: In Cry Of The Vultriss, the planet Cygia-Rema is apparently being held together with the Crystal Spires and Togas equivalent of spit and baling wire after a failed experiment by what the natives call "Tim-Ordia", better known to the rest of the universe as Time Lords.
Comic Books
- A variant in American Vampire, where it's a nickname that is corrupted. The Gray Trader should actually be known as The Great Traitor, as he once was humanity's champion but betrayed it to become a follower of an Eldritch Abomination.
- This is the origin of Booster Gold's name: initially planning on calling himself "Goldstar", when asked for his name during his first public appearance, he mistakenly gave his college football nickname "Booster" before walking it back, resulting in him saying "Boost...er...Gold!". The name thus stuck.
- In the Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight story arc "Going Sane", the Joker, thinking he has killed Batman, momentarily gains sanity and tries to start a new life as Joseph "Joe" Kerr.
- Bodies (2014):
- The real name of Maplewood, the central character of the 2050 storyline, is Margaret Mae Belwood.
- In the future, Longharvest Lane is known as "Ongarvane", thanks to its road sign breaking and the other letters being illegible.
- Captain Marvel (Marvel Comics): This is how Captain Marvel gets his name. After the Fantastic Four defeated both a Kree Sentry as well as Ronan the Accuser, a team is dispatched by the Kree to more properly investigate Earth with Mar-Vell, a captain in the Kree war fleet, being chosen to be the man on the ground. Having infiltrated a military base in the guise of the deceased Walter Lawson, Mar-Vell is forced into direct action when the inert Kree Sentry suddenly reactivates and begins making its way to a nearby nuclear reactor to destroy it and wipe out everything in the area. He identifies himself to the Sentry in an attempt to talk it down, but the Sentry's programming demands destroying the base completely in case the humans managed to scan its technology. The defending soldiers overhear the Sentry address him as "Captain Mar-Vell" and assume that it's actually saying "Captain Marvel". That his Kree uniform resembles a superhero costume not unlike Captain America's helps.
- Demon Knights: It's implied that the Demon Knights, an earlier incarnation of Stormwatch, got their name from mishearing the threat they were created to fight, the Daemonites.
- The Eternals: Various members of the titular group of super-humans have been assumed for figures in various myths and legends, implying their names may have gotten corrupted over time or to fit certain cultural sensibilities. For example, Phastos is interpreted by some humans as the ancient Greek god Hephaestus, and Sersi is better known as the witch named Circe, also from Greek myth. What confuses this matter is that some of the figures these characters are inspired by also exist within the Marvel Universe, with their names unaltered.
- Kamandi gets his name because he's from the Command D bunker.
- In The Sandman (1989) story arc "A Game of You", the cartoon characters from Barbie's childhood imagination reference someone named "Mr. Murphy". He turns out to be none other than Dream of the Endless, a.k.a. Morpheus.
- Ultimate Universe (2023): In the universe of Earth-6160 Uatu is a garbled mistranslation of a shortened version of her actual name; Ultron 82, or U-82 for short.
- Uncanny X-Men (2024): Deathdream was born with the name Hotaru, but is called "Hotoru" because his little brother Keito was not able to pronounce his name properly and as Keito died very young, Deathdream decided to keep the name as a reminder.
- In Steve Gerber's Void Indigo, the main character, Jhagur, becomes known as "Mick Jagger" after changing his appearance into that of a human.
Fan Works
- Angel of the Bat III: Da Pacem Domine: The Spectre is initially identified with their comic-accurate true name, Aztar, a name that is strictly fantastical. It is later revealed "Aztar," was a misheard corruption of "Asher," which is a Hebrew name. Finally, it's confirmed the full name is "Asherel," giving the Spectre the same naming convention as the angels in the Bible. All of this happened without the Spectre stopping it because they felt unworthy to have a name meaning, "Blessing of God."
- Black Sky: Xanxus learns he was named "Alexandro" at birth, with his mother affectionately nicknaming him Xandru. After her memory was damaged when her son was around two years old, she couldn't correct him anymore when he prononced it wrong.
- A Brane of Extraordinary Women
starts out with a multi-crossover where an assortment of characters from Hermione Granger to Alex Mack join forces to defeat the demon "D'lazza". Several books later, it turns out that the demon is actually Danielle Rasa Atron, the nemesis of an alternate version of Alex, who summons and merges with a demon — thus garbling her voice to make her own pronunciation of her name sound like "Da'el 'aza A'o" — before being banished over a million years into the past, forming a Stable Time Loop.
- In Galia-4, it turns out that Apos'alu is the original ruler of Galia and thus the goddess that the Patasi are worshipping, except they only know her through myth which gives her name as Abozalu instead.
- In Wherever You Are (a fanfic based on Calvin and Hobbes), it's revealed that Hobbes's real name is Hops, but Calvin mispronounced it due to a runny nose.
Film — Animated
- Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2: All of the Foodimals know Flint Lockwood as Inwoo due to a recording he made being bugged of breaking his name in such a way on repeat.
- The LEGO Movie:
- Lord Business's superweapon is called "The Kragle". It's just a tube of Krazy Glue with smudges over the z, y, and u.
- His other artifacts, all regular human items, also have names that are gross mispronunciations of their actual names, like nail polish remover called the "Po-Leesh Ree-mover of Nah'iyl" and an Exact-O knife called the "Sword of Exact Zero".
- Lightyear: The Evil Emperor Zurg is identified as such by his robotic minions, then it's revealed the name came about because an alternate Buzz Lightyear arrived in the far future and discovered several robots including the then-unnamed Zurg mech. After activating some of the robots and telling them his name, they kept mispronouncing it as "B-zzurg".
Film — Live-Action
- Avatar: Jake Sully is informally called "Jakesully" by the other Na'vi, as they don't quite understand the concept of a "first name" and "last name".
- Captain Marvel: Amnesiac Air Force pilot Carol Danvers is teleported out to Kree space, with only her name tag in pieces. A Kree finds her and her broken name tag with the inscription "vers", which becomes Carol Danvers's appellation.
- Hitman: Agent 47: Katia's name, Katia van Dees, is actually based on the French word for 90, "Quatre-vingt-dix", because she is a clone, like Agent 47, and her ID number was 90.
- Lion: Saroo's birth name is actually "Sheru", but he was unable to pronounce or spell it correctly when he was little, and thus when he got lost in another state, the authorities there recorded his name as "Saroo" and he became stuck with that name.
- Planet of the Apes (2001): Leo arrives at the ancient ape holy site Calima and discovers it's actually the wreck of his space station Oberon and the name "Calima" was derived from a sign in the station's ape containment chamber which said "Caution: Live Animals". Thus, the planet's apes are the now-evolved descendants of the apes aboard the station and the enslaved humans are the descendants of his shipmates.
- In Rain Man, Charlie believes that he had an imaginary friend named the Rain Man when he was a child. Eventually he realizes that the Rain Man was his autistic older brother, Raymond (who was later institutionalized).
- Star Trek: The Motion Picture: V'Ger, the mysterious alien cloud that is searching for Earth turns out to be the Voyager 6, a space probe sent from Earth in the 20th century.
- Zardoz: The big twist near the finale is that the supposed god "Zardoz" is really a God Guise that Arthur Frayn created by mangling the title of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
Literature
- Alex Rider: SCORPIA assassin Yassen Gregorovich's real name is Yasha. Russian Roulette (2013) reveals this came about from Yasha's meeting with Sharkovsky after having been beaten up by his bodyguards, where the latter misheard his name as "Yassen".
- American Gods: Shadow had a friend in prison known as Low Key Lyesmith. Given the strong presence of Norse gods in the story, it should come as little surprise when he shows up and turns out to be Loki, the Liesmith.
- In The Archmage's Restaurant, "Ellesion" isn't actually El's real name, but an accidental misspelling of his South Korean name when he was forcibly conscripted into the military as a mage on an administrative error. The person handling the conscription has no concept of South Korean nomenclature and simply wrote down what sounded correct to him phonetically. So El is stuck with this name as everyone addresses him by it.
- An ongoing joke in Beware of Chicken where most of the characters are named by the native English-speaking main character only to be misinterpreted by the other characters who natively speak Chinese. Big D becomes Bi De. Rizzo becomes Ri Zu. Tigger becomes Tigu. Chunky is Chun Ke. Peppa is now Pi Pa. Washy is Wa Shi. Babe and Sunny are Bei Be and Su Ne. And the recipients of these name, sapient animals, are intensely proud of the names received from their esteemed master!
- The Chrysalids takes place in a post-nuclear holocaust Labrador, Canada, and thus many names are misspelled names of actual places. The settlement of Waknuk is actually Wabush, the government Rigo is named after Rigolet, and an island of Newf is mentioned as well. Petra also makes contact with a distant civilization of telepathic people with powers like her and her friends, and when spelling out their name of Zealand they assume, due to her young age, that she misspelled the word and refer to it as "Sealand" for the remainder of the story.
- One of the BBC Books tie-ins for Doctor Who (pre-revival series) took place on an alien planet, where the local characters all had names like Pe Pertanor or Fe Fernandor, who naturally parsed "the Doctor" as something similar and concluded it was the surname "Thedoctor". The Doctor, for his part, misunderstood in the opposite direction, assuming that the locals were simply named Pertanor and Fernandor and "Pe" and "Fe" were time-saving nicknames as opposed to separate first names, ending up adopting the name of "The Thedoctor" more or less entirely through mutual incomprehension.
- In Draka Greed And Friendship, Draka gets her name in her first human interaction after gaining the Tongues advancement. She introduces herself to Lanie as a dragon, but the little girl can't pronounce "dragon" correctly and calls her "draka", which the previously nameless Draka decides is as good a name as any.
- Dracula: Once Lucy becomes a vampire and begins biting children. The children that are found keep calling her the "Bloofer Lady" which is a mistranslation of "Beautiful Lady", likely because the kids were still in a daze when questioned what happened to them. Regardless, the newspapers covering their mysterious circumstances dubbed her as such.
- Earth's Children begins with The Protagonist (a Cro-magnon) losing her family in an earthquake and being taken in by Neanderthals. She tries to tell her caregivers Creb and Iza her name, but their kind can't articulate as well as hers and they are unable to pronounce it properly. The closest they can come is Ayla which she accepts because, even though she's a young child at this stage, she senses they can't say her real name.
- Ender's Game: Ender's birth name was actually Andrew, but his older sister (who was 2-3 at the time he was born) couldn't pronounce it correctly and called him "Ender" instead until that name stuck.
- The Four Gospels: Judas Iscariot's surname is commonly believed to be a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew phrase "ish Kerioth," which roughly translates to "Man from Kerioth." With Kerioth being a town of Judea, it suggests it should have served as an epithet akin to "Jesus of Nazareth" rather than a familial surname.
- Galaxy of Fear: In "Army of Terror", the Arrandas find an infant that they name "Eppon" after the infant babbles the word nonstop. It's later revealed that the infant doesn't actually have a name, only a designation that it's trying to pronounce: Weapon.
- His Dark Materials: Jopari is one of the names that John Parry is known by in Lyra's world, chiefly in his life as a shaman among the Yeniseian peoples.
- The Left Hand of Darkness: Ambassador Genly Ai goes by "Genry" while on Gethen, as the local languages don't use the L sound. It's enough of an obstacle that his closest Gethenian acquiantance even calls him Genry through Telepathy.
- In The Lord of the Rings, when Saruman is cast out of Isengard and takes over The Shire out of vindictive revenge, his henchmen, and even some Hobbits, refer to him as "Sharkey" — a corrupted version of his Orc-name, Sharkû, meaning "Old Man".
- "Magic City": From 1939 to 1941, Nelson S. Bond wrote a series of science fiction shorts about Meg, a priestess of a Lady Land who rebels against her tribe, partly by taking a man as an equal partner. "Magic City" describes Meg and her husband Daiv's journey from the land of Jinnia (in the country of Tizathy: at one point Meg actually recites an ancient magical incantation that begins with the line, "My country, Tizathy") to the far-off city of Loalnyawk (New York City), to slay Death who dwells in a temple called Slukes. Along the way, they come to the entrance of the ruined Holland Tunnel in "Joysy" and assume its street signs (which read "NO Parking" and "NO Left Turn") to be prayers. When they reach Loalnyawk, Daiv points out that the temple is clearly marked STLUKES, and Meg reminds him that the Ancient Ones often wrote carelessly and misspelled things (one harsh-sounding example of such writing in Loalnyawk reads "Mcmxl"). Later on, Meg stops a band of marauders by standing in their way, raising an arm and yelling "HOLD!"; she's got a big book in her other hand, and is mistaken for the living image of a familiar New York landmark which she hasn't seen yet but which the locals have naturally assumed to be the image of a goddess named Salibbidy. In another story in the same series where she first meets Daiv, Meg discovers "the Place of the Gods", giant carvings of gods known as Jarg, Ibrim, Taamuz, and Tedhi (George, Abraham, Thomas, Teddy) — Mount Rushmore.
- The Malloreon:
- The mysterious child Errand turns out to have gained his Verbal Tic Name because it reminded him of "Eriond", his proper name as a nascent god.
- The High Places of Korim from The Prophecy turn out to be called the Turim Reef in the present day: millennia of linguistic drift have obscured the name, plus the god Torak's World Sundering shifted the site's location (and altitude) enough that the few immortals old enough to know about it fail to make the connection.
- Mayo Chiki!: Kinjiro Sakamachi. When his name is said in full Japanese order — Sakamachi Kinjiro — it has an unfortunate arrangement such that the last syllable of his surname and the first of his given name can be combined to sound like "chicken" (Sakama — "chicken" — Jiro), which has led to him being called either "Chicken Jiro" or just "Chicken", something he really has a major complex with, thus he prefers to be addressed as "Jiro".
- The Pendragon Adventure: The map the Jakills have of the world outside Ibara refers to a place as "Rubity". Bobby Pendragon has no idea what this means until he sees the broken Lifelight Pyramid upon reaching Rubity. He then asks if Ibara is the name of the entire world or just the island. The world itself is named Veelox, which immediately makes Bobby realize "Rubity" is (or was) actually Rubic City. The Jakills themselves were also named after Aja Killian, Veelox's Traveler and the founder of Ibara.
- Pyramids: The protagonist Teppic was technically called "Pteppic" as a child in his native Djelibeybi, but when he was sent to study at the Assassins' Guild in Ankh-Morpork, the teacher inducting him couldn't pronounce it. The narration and other characters refer to him as "Teppic" for the rest of the book.
- Redwall: According to one of the series' many musical numbers, the building known as "Saint Ninian's", near the Abbey, started with a sign reading "THIS AIN'T NINIAN'S," put up by Ninian's long-suffering wife, which later suffered damage.
- "WondLa" from The Search for WondLa: Eva Nine's only link to the surface world is a battered piece of cardboard bearing the fragmented words "wond" and "la", which she and MUTHR simply call "WondLa". It is actually a textual corruption of the cover from L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz with letters worn away over time in this ruined setting. When the still-functioning library computer finally identifies the artifact, the reveal turns Eva's lifelong Driving Question into a gut-punch about lost human history and makes "WondLa" function as Arc Words for the whole trilogy.
- Scarlet Morning: Wilmur, who's not happy to be asked "What kind of name is that?", eventually learns that he might actually be named William, the long-lost son of the pirate Cadence Chase and the Queensman Herman Ravenspurn. That leaves the question of whether he was hidden in infancy to keep him safe for them or from them.
- Shades of Grey:
- Due to the setting being very Future Imperfect, this happens a lot concerning the Previous (i.e. normal humans). There's mention of "Chuck Naurice" as a legendary figure of the Previous in the first novel, and the Chromaticians fear swimming in the ocean due to the "Undertoad" which is said to consume them (which is a pun on 'undertow', another term for a rip current).
- More dramatically, works of literature from the Previous are given titles and altered plotlines to promote chromatic compliance; for instance, The Tragedy of the Chromatically Non-compliant and Clearly Idiotic Romeo and Juliet, and its musical version, Red Side Story. There's also a mention of a "Greys & Dolls''.
- Slayers: Lina Inverse's signature spell, the Dragon Slave, was, as she explains to her traveling companions, once originally called Dragon Slayer. However, over time the name was corrupted, until it went by the current name.
- A Song of Ice and Fire: Maggy the Frog was an old fortune teller and witch woman who lived in Lannisport, brought to Westeros from Essos by her trader husband. Qyburn believes her name is a corruption of maegi, a woman who practices blood magic. Her real name was, according to Cersei, "something long and eastern and outlandish."
- Transformers: Exodus: The gladiator who would come to be known as Megatron originally called himself Megatronus, after one of the Thirteen Primes of Cybertronian lore. He shortened it after one bout when he noticed that when the crowd was chanting his name, they'd end it on the stronger vowel.
- Aliac from the Wolves of the Beyond series turns out to be Caila suffering from memory loss and reversing her true name.
- Worm: When Scion first appeared, he gave his name as "Zion," but it was misheard as "Scion," and the corruption stuck.
Live-Action TV
- The 100: A few examples, the result of the fallout of nuclear war. Washington DC is shortened to "Ton DC," while "Polis," a nearby city, is revealed ro be a corruption of the name of the spacecraft helmed by the scientist who invented Nightblood: Polaris. Fans also speculated that the name "Polis" might have also been reinforced by context clues that indicate Polis is likely where Annapolis is today.
- Cake Boss: Buddy Valastro's first name is actually Bartolo, but recalls he got the nickname Buddy when he and his father first worked at Carlos Bakery and told their co-workers their first name, no one was able to pronounce it correctly and just stuck with "Buddy".
- Doctor Who: In "A Good Man Goes to War", River Song reveals how she got her name. She is Amy's daughter Melody Pond, who was kidnapped shortly after birth. The natives reversed and mistranslated her name, resulting in "Melody" becoming "Song" and, since there were no ponds on the planet, "Pond" became "River".
- Game of Thrones: In the episode "The Door'', it's revealed that Hodor was once a normal stableboy name Wylis. While trying to save Bran and Meera from attacking White Walkers, Bran wargs into the mind of the young Wylis while connected to the mind of the current Wylis. The shock of feeling his older self's death and the misheard shouts of "Hold the door!" causes Wylis to become the simple minded Hodor.
- Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries: In the episode "Murder a la Mode", in which fashion plays a big role in the story, Bert and Cecil get the name of someone who sent the Victim of the Week flowers: "Garry and Molly Nex". Phryne later figures out that the sender wasn't two people, but "Galeries Molyneux", a high-end fashion store that had ordered a haute-couture collection from the victim.
- Red Dwarf: The Cat's species (Felis sapiens) remembered Lister as "Cloister the Stupid" for having given up his freedom to save their ancestor Frankenstein (his pet cat who he had illegally smuggled on board Red Dwarf; rather than give her up, which would have resulted in her being put down, he chose to be punished by being frozen in one of the ship's stasis pods for the rest of the voyage, forfeiting any pay he might have earned in the process). In the novels, the Cats were of two opinions: Some said that he was named Cloister and some said he was named Clister. They had a holy war over it.
- Silicon Valley: Jared's name is actually Donald but on the first day of his job at Hooli, Gavin Belson started calling him "Jared" and everyone, including Jared himself, were too scared to correct him. Even though Jared quits Hooli in the first episode, he is known pretty much exclusively as Jared throughout the series.
- Star Trek: The Original Series:
- "The Omega Glory" sees Kirk, Spock, and McCoy on a very Earth-like planet, with the native populace divided into two factions, "Yangs" and "Kohms", as well as a document that they all seek. As Kirk learns more about the civilization, he realizes that "Yangs" is a corruption of "Yankees", and "Kohms" is Communists, after the leader of the Yangs recites a badly mispronounced Pledge of Allegiance.
- The Paradise Syndrome: After Kirk is zapped by an alien machine and rendered partially amnesiac, his struggles to tell the locals his name result in him being dubbed "Kirok".
- The V'draysh in the Star Trek: Discovery Short Treks episode "Calypso" are a future version of the Federation, their name corrupted over the centuries, per Word of God.
- The Twilight Zone (2002): A group of soldiers is hunting a dangerous creature known as a "Kreetor" previously thought to have been hunted into extinction. At the end it's revealed that the soldiers are robots and the creature is a human. "Kreetor" is a mangled version of "creator".
Podcasts
- Mockery Manor: The name of the Mockery family, the owner and namesake of the titular theme park, is mentioned in an early episode to be a corrupted form of their Scottish family name, Mochrie.
Tabletop Games
- BattleTech: As a somewhat clumsy Retcon, the J. Edgar hovertank became this. Officially, the tank's original name was the Jun Edgar hovertank, after the engineer who designed it. Since "Jun" meant "purity" in Japanese, some ComStar fanatics took offense at this because in their minds, only Jerome Blake was "pure." So any transmission sent regarding the tank called it the J. Edgar instead of the Jun Edgar until it became so widely known by that name that the manufacturer gave up trying to correct it.
- Magic: The Gathering: The planeswalker Gideon Jura was born Kytheon Iora, but his first planeswalk was to the world of Bant, where the natives couldn't pronounce his name properly.
- In Orpheus, people in the know generally refer to the all-devouring, universe-ending, absolute force of entropy at the bottom of the underworld (that which wraiths know as Oblivion) as "the Grandmother". It is actually a corruption of the original title by which Oblivion was called, which is the "Grand Maw" (or, hence, "Grandma").
- The Spitalians of Degenesis are called that because they're based in "the Spital" — that is, in what was a major hospital in the early days of the apocalypse.
Video Games
- Arcanum: Garfield Thelonius Remmington III adopts the name "Gar" in order to perform as a "Freakshow" act, which needs the audience to believe he's an orc rather than a human in order to be successful.
- Commander Keen: The leader of the Shikadi, the Gannalech, turns out to be Keen's nemesis Mortimer McMire, AKA "The Grand Intellect". The Shikadi were never able to pronounce his title right.
- Edge of Awakening: Tsukumo and Mayunganashi have been renamed after their death and subsequent resurrection as Brainwashed and Crazy marebito with names similar to their living names: Tsukumo's current name uses a different kanji combination from when he was alive, and Mayunganashi's real name is Mayū.
- Fallout:
- Fallout 3: The small settlement of Arefu gets its name from a damaged road sign that used to read "CAREFUL", before the "C" and "L" were removed.
- Fallout: New Vegas:
- The small tourist town of Novac takes its name from the busted "No Vacancy" sign at the motel the town is built around.
- It's mentioned that the city of Tucson, Arizona has since been named "Two-Sun" by the locals after the nuclear war. Ghoul mechanic Raul Tejada, who was alive back before the bombs, is a bit annoyed at this and refuses to refer to it as anything other than Tucson.
- The Big Empty's real name is "Big Mountain", often shortened into "Big MT". The scientists there know of the nickname but are adamant that visitors to their facility only refer to it by its proper name.
- Fallout 4: The town of Bar Harbor, Maine is now called "Far Harbor", due the town's welcome sign smudging the "B" into an "F".
- Fire Emblem: Three Houses has a willing example. Claude, leader of the Golden Deer House, is partially Almyran, and his birth name is Khalid. To study in Fodlan, he changed his name and downplayed most of his heritage.
- Kingdom Hearts: In the past, Hollow Bastion was once known as Radiant Garden. In Kingdom Hearts II, after defeating the MCP and taking over the system, Tron finds data that activates a light show across the entire town, causing everyone to remember the true name of the world they live in. Merlin even questions how Radiant Garden came to be known as Hollow Bastion in the first place (it's implied the castle's name is "Hollow Bastion", and considering that was all that was left of the world by KHI...)
- The Last Sovereign: The orcs of this setting are not the most articulate of creatures, and their mishearing and mispronouncing certain terms gave a couple of characters their names. The Evil Overlord known as the Doom King (actually protagonist Simon in disguise) is so called because the orcs overheard the protagonists discussing their Doomed King Plan, started referring to the fake overlord as the Doom King, and the protagonists decided to run with it. Similarly, the Doom King's chief lieutenant Dargai (also actually protagonist Simon in disguise) is so called because some of the locals misheard the orcs referring to their commander as "dark guy."
- The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker: Knowledge of the Triforce has been largely lost, with a few Fishmen referring to the golden "Triumph Forks" when telling Link about the nearby islands.
- Live A Live: The main antagonists share a Theme Naming where all of them sound like "Odio". Then the Middle Ages chapter starts which reveals the origin of this: The heroic knight Oersted was hit with a Trauma Conga Line so horrific that he became the villain he was framed as, becoming the Lord of Dark Odio, where his initial Canon Name is the only resemblance to the Odio naming convention in the chapter.
- Myst: Atrus' wife Catherine was originally named Katran in her birth language. Atrus misheard this as Catherine and was somehow never able to hear the difference, until eventually she gave up on correcting him.
- Prisoner of Ice: Ryan doesn't know who his real parents were, having been abandoned by them as an infant. The only connection he has with his past is a metal plate with the name "Ryan" on it. It's actually only half of the plate, the other part having been lost when Ryan's father, Howard Philips Parker, sent him into the past from 1989. His real name is Parker, Yan.
- Shin Megami Tensei IV: The legendary King Aquila, first king of Mikado, turns out to have originally been named Akira. Given how he also named many locations in Mikado as similarly altered versions of ones in his homeland of Tokyo (i.e. Shinjuku became Shen Duque), this was probably intentional.
- Team Fortress 2: The city of Teufort (where the classic map "2Fort" is located) used to be known as "Hugginsville", but a roving band of teenagers bullied the spineless Mayor Huggins into changing the name to "Two-Farts". Even after they left, Huggins was too scared to change it all the way back, so the final name became "Teufort".
Web Animation
- Hunter: The Parenting: Ms. Mark, the Fatigues' guide during their ill-fated expedition to the Taga-Aminhan mountains in the Phillippines, introduces herself as "Markupo", but the Fatigues decide to dub her "Ms. Mark" because it sounds more "Christian". It later turns out that "Markupo" is her codename in the revolutionary Nails of Christ organization, and her actual name is Wayda.
Webcomics
- Avengers Academy (2024): A sideplot is the souls of Scarlet Witch's twins, Billy and Tommy Maximoff, running away from the Satan expy Mephisto, whom Billy calls "Mister Fisto".
- cool and new web comic: The enhanced characters are constantly called by corrupted names by all the corrupted characters, which are almost always misspelled versions of their names.
- Surviving the Game as a Barbarian: When Arua Raven the mage and Ainar the barbarian join the same adventuring team, Arua reluctantly allows Ainar to call her "Arr" or "Aru" because she struggles with the full pronunciation.
- Unsounded: Mathis Quigley is quite famous in Cresce as his wife's murder and his own escape from Alderode have been turned into a popular play. However he's known as "Matis Keegley" rather than by his properly spelled name as this spelling is closer to how his name is pronounced and better fits Crescian pronunciation rules.
Web Video
- Dimension 20: In the Misfits and Magic holiday special, the Pilot Program is introduced to the Tadeshecourt, a manifestation of anti-magic that appears as a bear with a deer's skull for a head. In the second season, the Tadershecourt, a much stronger embodiment of diminishing magic appears as a bear with an antlered human skull for a head, appears. He explains that the deer-skull form the Pilot Program met was summoned by wizards in an Imperfect Ritual who tried to summon him and misnamed him, inadvertently creating a similar but different entity.
- In the [1] Scootertrix Gen 1 abridged video series, the ponies all refer to Megan as "Meegan".
- I'm a Marvel... And I'm a DC: In the "Rorschach and Deadpool" miniseries, the Arc Villain is named "Joe Polachi", leader of the gangsters coming after the titular duo. He turns out to be The Joker from The Dark Knight Returns, the more subtle, less funny and more serious version of the Clown Prince of Crime, and he bemoans the fact that he tried to go by the name Pagliacci explicitly as a Stealth Pun, but they can't pronounce it correctly so everyone just went with that.
Western Animation
- Ben 10: Omniverse: The Annihilarrgenesistoriathimiorgost is a Doomsday Device able to cause a Class 4X Apocalypse, or create a universe if there is nothing for it to destroy. Most know it as the Annihilarrgh, with the explanation being that according to legend, if it went off, you'd only have time to say the first part before dying.
- The Codename: Kids Next Door episode "Operation S.A.T.U.R.N." featured a parody of V'Ger from Star Trek: The Motion Picture named RaMon-4, which turns out to be a rejected Rainbow Monkey design called "Rainbow Monkey 4-Ever".
- South Park: "The Big Fix" reveals that Token Black's real first name is Tolkien, with everyone up to then having mispronounced and/or misspelt it. After this episode, every prior episode of the show had its subtitles edited to spell Token's name as "Tolkien" (barring subtitles for Stan and Randy as they thought his name really was "Token").
- Star Trek: Lower Decks: Parodied in "Crisis Point 2: Paradoxus" when Boimler learns that Ki-Ty-Ha was a corruption of "Kitty Hawk", and "Ki-Ty-Ha" is in fact the Wright Flyer. The episode treats this as just more of the increasingly bizarre nonsense the holodeck is being forced to generate on the fly because Boimler's depression over being informed that his transporter duplicate has died has caused him to get Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer.
Real Life
- The Italian chef Ettore Boiardi, of the Chef Boyardee brand, is probably best known through his Americanized name, "Hector Boyardee".
- Egyptian Pharaoh Sesostris' name is commonly believed to be a corruption of the name "Senusret" as the first records of him was in Herodotus' Histories, which were written over 1,000 years after Sesostris' life and transliterated from Egyptian into Greek. Similarly, his son was recorded to have the name "Pheron" which was likely a misinterpretation of his title of Pharaoh. note
- Actress Thandiwe Newton went by the Stage Name "Thandie Newton" for most of her career because of a typo in her first-ever movie credit; she reclaimed her real name in 2021 and is credited by it now.
- Oprah Winfrey's parents originally named her Orpah (after the Biblical figure), but pretty much everyone who saw it written down misread it, and eventually they just rolled with the misreading.
- Olympic swimmer Cynthia Woodhead competed in the summer games. Her younger sister couldn't pronounce Cynthia well, so she shortened it to "Cippy," a moniker that caught on with the sportscasters, who called her "Cippy" almost exclusively.
- Notorious hijacker D.B. Cooper actually bought his ticket under the alias "Dan Cooper". A journalist mistakenly reported it as "D.B. Cooper" and it just caught on.
- Singer Collins Chibueze performs under the stage name Shaboozey, inspired by how his high school football coach mispronounced his surname.
- In this clip, Uzo Aduba discusses this trope and how her mother ultimately encouraged her to defy it. Aduba explains that when she was a child, no one in her New England community could pronounce her full name, "Uzoamaka." She became so frustrated that she asked her mother if she could be called "Zoe" instead, but the older woman instead instilled pride in the name and told her not to give up: "If they can learn to say 'Tchaikovsky' and 'Michelangelo' and 'Doestoevsky', then they can learn to say 'Uzoamaka.'"