Jay-Z Said Only 1 Person in His Life Called Him by His Real Name 

Jay-Z’s birth name is Shawn Carter. He adopted the name Jay-Z based on a childhood nickname and has kept it ever since. He said that everyone in his personal life has come to call him by his stage name except one. Jay-Z shared the one person in his life who still called him Shawn.

Jay-Z said only one person called him by his name

While Jay-Z doesn’t sound remotely close to Shawn, the moniker is based on a childhood nickname. When he began rapping as a kid, people began to refer to him as Jazzy. He adopted Jay-Z based on that, his mentor Jaz-O, and the J/Z train line near his childhood home.

The nickname has completely overtaken his birth name. He said that not even his mother still called him Shawn. There was only one person in his life who still used his birth name.

“No, [my mom] calls me Jay,” he told The Guardian in 2010. “Nobody calls me Shawn except my grandmother.”

Jay-Z explained the meaning behind another name

Another one of Jay-Z’s nicknames is HOV. This is an abbreviation of J-hova, a play on Jehovah. Early in his career, people saw something almost divine in the fact that he could write songs in a matter of minutes. He explained that he wasn’t comfortable with people calling him a God, but he accepted J-hova.

“I didn’t want them to think that I was saying that I’m God or anything like that,” Jay-Z said, per Distractify. “I know better than that.”

He became known as “One-Take HOV” because of his routine in the recording studio.

“This was when you were recording to actual tape. So, you can’t mess up, ‘cause then you got to go all the way back and cut the tape,” he said on CBS Mornings (per Billboard). “That’s where the whole ‘One-Take HOV’ came from. Because if you wanted a fly chorus on this thing, you had to go to dinner. It took an engineer hours to cut the tape… fly it over here… So I start learning my lyrics really good so I could do them one time — you understand — straight down, and I didn’t waste time.”

His wife’s family might have wished they didn’t have to call her by her real name

Unlike her husband, Beyoncé uses her given name. Her mother gave her the name as a nod to her family name, Beyince. She worried the last name would die out, as only one of her siblings had a son. While it was a nod to her family, they were not happy with it.

“My family was not happy,” Tina Knowles told Rolling Stone. “My dad said, ‘She’s gonna be really mad at you, because that’s a last name.’ And I’m like, ‘It’s not a last name to anybody but you guys.’”