We have a four-year-old
Josephine, and her nickname is
Posy. It totally suits her. I don’t feel it’s infantile and too cutesy at all. My great grandmother’s name was
Josephine, so we named our daughter after her, but I disliked all the “
Jo,” “
Josie,” “
Joey,” etc nicknames since they’re all fairly popular. We’re big on nicknames in my family (I’m
Margaret, nn
Maggie) so we knew we wanted to find a nickname we would mainly use for her. In my research, when I came across
Posy as a nn for
Josephine, I fell in love with it. It’s definitely more of a popular nickname in
Europe than in the US where we live, and I love that it isn’t heard as often here. It is an adorable name for a little girl, and if ever our
Posy decides she wants to be called something else, she has options. This is why we chose
Josephine over just
Posy as her main name. Also,
Josephine at least contains the letters P, O, and S as a start to the nn
Posy. In this way, it makes a little bit of sense as a nn to me. I mean, there are all sorts of weird nicknames out there;
James nn
Jim;
Margaret nn
Peggy;
Richard nn
Dick, just to name a few… How is
Posy for
Josephine so incredibly confusing and far-fetched for people? Everyone who has met our daughter and/or heard her mn and nn has loved it. They could just be being polite, but I feel their reactions have been genuine. Anyway, sorry for the long response. I simply wanted to share our experience with these names, let you know that we’re total fans of the
Josephine nn
Posy combination, and we’ve only had overwhelmingly positive experiences and responses so far.