I love this particular word. Being a slang term, it has had so many spellings that it’s kind of difficult to keep track. in 1851, the word was included in Henry Mayhew’s book London Labour and the London Poor as monekeer. It was recorded in the Sydney Slang Dictionary in Australia in 1881 as monniker, and there is strong evidence of its use in the States not long after.
The implication is that it was a London term, which spread around the globe as people migrated. One proposal as to its evolution is that the word started out as the Middle English word ekename (an ancient term which later evolved into the word nickname) and that was converted into moniker by backslang.
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