In the linguistic picture of the world anthroponyms occupy a unique position, because man’s perception of himself as the center of the universe is manifested in the creation of many nominations, where the substantial nature of the human essence comes to the fore. The nomination of anthroponyms is an integral part of the nominative system of language, which follows all its laws and norms. The formation of new human names is carried out as a result of changes in the morpheme of the word, but most often through semantic changes in the word. The article is devoted to the analysis of nominative metonymic processes and lexical changes that took place in English nicknames at the end of the XX – beginning of the XXI century. Metonymic nicknames, formed on adjacency, are focused on the function of pointing up the characteristic feature of the object. Metonymy is a way of indirectly characterizing an object by highlighting one of its constant, variable or random features, which in this situation seems significant to the subject. The largest number of metonymic nicknames, according to our observations, is formed by metonymic transposition, where the whole is replaced by a part. The cognitive mechanism of metonymy creates a conceptual “shift”, and thus metonymy directly indicates the presence in the depths of human cognition on a larger-scale relative to the “parts” of conceptual units, knowledge of the world. Numerous nickname examples in the investigation testify to the fact that metonymy is one of the most productive ways of nickname formation and the meanings of new nominations give the exclusive material to the scientists for further linguistic, sociological, and psychological research.