Packie

A working nickname rather than a formal name

Packie is not a name in its own right. It is what happens to Pádraig in English-speaking Ireland: a familiar form, used among family and neighbours, that sits alongside Paddy without replacing it. The best-known bearer is Packie Bonner, the Donegal goalkeeper who spent most of his career at Celtic and is remembered for the penalty save against Romania at the 1990 World Cup that put the Republic of Ireland into the quarter-finals.

That is the register the name lives in — local, male, unpretentious. Nobody is christened Packie. A dog called Packie is being given a nickname as a name, which is a different thing from being given Patrick.

What the -ack- is doing there

Patrick is Latin Patricius, from pater, father: a patrician, a member of the Roman hereditary nobility. The name reached Ireland with Christianity and became Pádraig, one of the commonest names on the island, largely because of the saint whose feast day is 17 March.

The -ck- in Packie is the part worth noticing. Irish builds pet forms by shortening a name and adding an ending, and the result often carries a hard consonant that the full name does not have: Pádraig produces both Paddy and Packie, and Páidí alongside them. Packie is not a corruption of anything. It is the ordinary machinery of the language working on an imported name.

In Massachusetts, a packie is a shop

There is a second word spelled the same way and it has nothing to do with Patrick. In New England, a packie is a package store — a shop licensed to sell alcohol — and the shortening is so ordinary there that people use it without ever thinking about where it came from. The "package" part is a hangover from Prohibition-era rules that required alcohol to leave the premises in sealed containers.

This matters if you live in Massachusetts, or if you tell anyone who does. In Dublin, Packie is a man. In Boston it is where you buy beer, and the joke will be made for you, repeatedly, whether you intended it or not.

Calling a dog Packie

PAK-ee. What is worth noticing here is that the name already arrives in calling shape. It is what a nickname sounds like when it has been worn down by use in a kitchen or across a field — short, with a hard k to give it a snap and a long vowel to hang onto. There is very little for you to do to it.

One warning about the spelling. Our own listing offers Paddy, Pat and Patty as variations, and the last of those is a trap. Patty is a shortening of Patricia and reads as a girl's name in Britain and America. Paddy is the spelling that means what you think it means; Packie is the one that looks like a nickname because it is one.

See also: Paddy · Patrick · Seamus · Declan · Conor

Common questions