Zelkova came from a game series called .hack. I enjoy words that use uncommon characters. Zelkova uses 3; Z, K, and V. Once upon a time I was "working" with a guy who was reverse engineering the .hack games, breaking their encryption and making tools to extract game data. I wanted to play with the game data and try to make a "game" from them, specifically a real multiplayer game based on .hack. Nothing really came of it, but I wanted a "codename". I picked Zelkova for the aforementioned reasons. I just sorta kept using it because it wasn't used online that often at the time. Now I'm Zelkova? Sometimes I use the name "ImZelkova" if "Zelkova" is taken. This isn't to state that "I am Zelkova", it's a quote. http://dothack.wikia.com/wiki/Zelkova
My current one is just Keyan, but my original one was keyan22, the origin of the 22 is that my birthdate is on a 22nd, and well, Keyan is my name. Some other characters are just words to put it simply, nothing special.
I don't recall how I got my main moniker, but it probably has to do with Army Ranks. I may or may have not given myself the rank of private. I've been called Reck on discord, but I don't use that in my IGNs. Maybe on my single player save files will I start to use it. A part of my IGNs on maple are related to the MGS series, and my main is a good example of that (OldSnake). This also includes this monstrosity:
All of my alts have random shitty meme names but I usually try to come up with some aesthetically fitting name for my mains. I tend to refrain from using words on characters I intend to play a lot and never use more than one. Also, if you use accents at all, you're tacky.
Take the name of a random object. Then take another name of something, if possible, completely different. Now is when the magic begins, write the first one, add Mac, and add the second. For example, first object: "table", second object: "lamp". And the name is: "TableMaclamp". Just something you're seeing at the moment, or the first thing that comes to your mind.
Everywhere that isn't Maplestory I use the name Zelkova for the same reason the well known Zelkova of Maplestory use it, it was a character from a video game that I liked and it look cool. Reason why my discord account name is Zelkova (and why I often get the messages meant for the admin) and while outside of Maplestory discord all of my friends know me as Zelkova though they often shorten it to simply Kova now. There are many Zelkova fans though online as I don't think I was able to grab the name before someone else did if the game is known at all. I start using Zerukoba for Steam and such just to be slightly more unique but for the sake of this forum I went with Zelly simply because Zelkova change my name to that for one reason or another on the discord. Honestly I like the name Zelly, remind me of skeleton stuff for some reason and it still start with a badass Z. For ign I was a mess, I do all kind of weird things to come up with names. For Maplestory though because the game require multiple characters I would just make a weeb name like Zerukoba and just switch the letters around for each new character. Zerukoba, Zerubako, Zekoruba, Zekobaru, Zebaruko, Zebakoru, etc. You could also just switch up the vowels so Zerukoba, Zurekoba, Zorukeba, etc. More weeb looking the name the easiest it is.
This is the reason why people shouldn't use or copy existing names as handles. It isn't unique when the name already belongs to something/someone else. How many times have the two of you tried to use Zelkova on the internet but it turned out to already be taken? Deriving your name from something and making it unique is much more appealing and obviously is less likely to already be used.
Or, y'know, make something completely original. It's what I have always done. Until I started using the name Samantha more often, of course.
When the Internet became widely available to everyone in the early 90s, there were many communities where you could discuss topics with. To do so, you would need a username. My unique username was created by watching the movie Spawn. I thought the character was really cool with its appearance and abilities. Naming myself Spawn, a character already created by someone else was a no go. So, I removed the 'wn' and randomly added 'dow' and thus Spadow was born. :-)
That is honestly interesting. I always thought you just took the name from the type of bird sparrow but change it slightly to make it cooler. Honestly I had always read your name as Sparrow out loud and still do so to this day because of where I thought you got it from. I completely agree. Honestly I regret using the name as long as I did but as stated all of my friends know me by it so it kinda one of those can't go back decisions. Even if I were to change it my friends will still just call me Zelkova or Kova. Kinda one of the great things about being part of a new community is that you can start anew.
When I was younger, I did a lot of writing with my own characters and stories. "Sunny" was one of them. I was never keen on giving my name out online, so I just went by the name of one of my old characters, and eventually, it stuck. Now even close friends call me Sunny. Most of my character names in Maplestory are either other characters I used to write when I was younger (since they're almost never taken) or stupid, referential humor.
I used to play Minecraft a lot and was obsessed with the redstone part of it, which gave birth to several of my usernames on other places. I tried to use "Redstone" as my username, but that was already taken so I chose this one instead.
Random short name + job name / a word associated with the job seems quite common. For mules, at least. My ign is NYAR0, my bish is NyaroFeather, my Cadena is NyaroHunter, and my Evan is NyaroDraco. But sometimes I just write stupid jokes like IceCreamLady for Aran, and PewPewNebby for Jett...
Most of my characters are Swift-something, i just liked the word swift and the second part is something related (even tangentially) to the character.