Przezwiska i pseudonimy sportowców

The authors present a selection of sportspersons' nicknames and pseudonyms used in the Polish and European media. The onomastic material was excerpted from the press, radio, television and the Internet. Dozens of personal names of Polish and world sportspersons were collected and analysed. The material was taken from the texts in, among others, Polish, English, German and Spanish. This paper aims at a typology of sportspersons' nicknames and pseudonyms and it constitutes an attempt to unveil the primary onomastic and language-systemic mechanisms behind such formations. Also, their semantic as well as structural-grammatical motivation is discussed.