At Carolina, there aren’t many phrases you’ll hear as often as “what’s your Onyen?” And while the “only name you’ll ever need” may not be as majestic as the Old Well or as mighty as Rameses, it’s an undeniably essential part of Carolina.
You know Onyen, pronounced “onion,” as UNC’s primary user ID. Onyens are used every day for default email addresses and logging into systems like ConnectCarolina, Time Information Management (TIM), Canvas and more.
And this month, the Onyen marks 24 years of service. On July 11, 2000, ITS announced the Onyen as a new name for consolidated logins at UNC. The name took effect a few weeks later on August 1.
Major initiative
In 2000, it was a major ITS initiative to create a common login across University systems. The announcement said that the creation of the Onyen was a “first step in that direction.”
This common login is something we take for granted today as we seamlessly move from service to service with just one username and password. But in 2000, you may have needed to juggle several different logins for Carolina systems. The last line in the announcement gives a peek at other logins in use at the time — “starting August 1, current services which ask for an Isis id, userID, etc. will start asking for an Onyen.”
While most of the work was technical and behind the scenes, there was one big public challenge — what to call the login.
ITS initially collected ideas for the new name. The 2000 announcement said that “the suggestions varied with little consensus. Of those suggested, EName seemed to have the edge.” Unfortunately, EName was trademarked at the time and couldn’t be used.
The only name you’ll ever need
Todd Lewis, a solutions engineer at ITS, didn’t create the Onyen, but was there when it was named. “About seven of us met in the stacks behind the help desk in Wilson Library to come up with something to replace EName,” he said.
“Someone said,” Lewis paraphrased, “We’ve got to come up with a word for ‘the only name you’ll ever need’. Someone else to my left wrote down ‘Onyen’ and slid the paper over where I could see it, I think as a joke,” he said. “One of the shortest meetings I’ve ever been in.”
Onyen met the criteria ITS was looking for. The announcement said the name “would not be easily confused with other userIDs and logins, it was memorable, short, not too dry and not copyrighted.”
Onyen was registered as a service mark in 2001. It’s one of the 46 trademarks owned by UNC-Chapel Hill.
Not an acronym
Lewis was quick to clarify that Onyen isn’t an acronym. “It’s a word,” he said. “After the announcement, we back-peddled hard on the acronym. But the damage was done.” Lewis prefers to say it’s “inspired by” the phrase “the only name you’ll ever need.”
Because it’s a word, it’s part of the University editorial guide as Onyen, not ONYEN, and is “all lowercase when used as a placeholder for an Onyen in a simulated ‘computer text’ context,” Lewis added.