Name-a-Day Calendar, June 2: Northern Kentucky Norse

Page 208 of 365

Chosen in: 1971

Chosen by: Student body vote

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The school currently known as Northern Kentucky University was originally founded in 1948 as an extension center of the University of Kentucky (UK). It split from UK to become its own college in 1968, taking on the name Northern Kentucky State College¹ in the most earth-shattering split from a UK this continent has ever seen.

Northern Kentucky would begin playing men’s basketball in 1971, but they needed a nickname first. The school’s student newspaper, The Northerner, held a vote to select one and “Norsemen” won. I could find no information on who originally suggested “Norsemen” as a nickname or on which other nicknames it defeated in the vote. When the school began playing women’s sports, those teams became known as the Norsewomen (or sometimes as the Lady Norse). Then, in 2000, “Norsemen” and “Norsewomen” were retired and combined into one singular “Norse”, which Northern Kentucky has used as its nickname ever since.

The Norse were medieval North Germanic people located in Scandinavia—ancestral to modern Denmark, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden—who spoke the Old Norse language. The term “Norse” itself is derived from the word “norden”, which translates from all North Germanic languages (namely Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish) to mean “the North” or “the Northern lands” in English. Simplified (perhaps overly so) to drive the point home, “Norse” means “northerners”.

Northern Kentucky’s mascot is Victor E. Viking, who got a “friendlier” makeover in 2016 to the dismay of many.

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1. Became Northern Kentucky University in 1976