Every Drake Nickname Explained: Drizzy, 6 God, Champagne Papi and More

Drizzy is a stretched-out version of Drake, built on the -izzy wordplay that ran through early-2000s rap slang. It is his oldest nickname and the one he has never publicly explained. His given name is Aubrey Drake Graham; Drake is his middle name.

He has collected several more since. Some are geography, some are branding, one is an Instagram handle that outgrew the app, and one is a three-letter acronym that ended up on the front of a Barcelona jersey. Here is every Drake nickname, sorted by how well each one is actually documented.

What is Drake's real name?

Aubrey Drake Graham, born October 24, 1986, in Toronto, Ontario.

Note the structure, because it matters for everything else: Drake is his real middle name, not an invention. He did not build a rap persona out of nothing. He picked the coolest word already sitting in his own legal name and dropped the rest.

Before any of it, he was an actor. From 2001 to 2008 he played Jimmy Brooks on the CTV teen drama Degrassi: The Next Generation, and in the industry he was known as Aubrey Graham from Degrassi. That is how producer Noah "40" Shebib knew him when the two met in 2005, before either of them was anybody.

Why is Drake called Drizzy?

Here is the honest answer, which is more interesting than the fake one: nobody has a sourced origin story, including Drake.

What we can do is place it. Drizzy sits inside a documented tradition of syllable-stretching in Black American speech, the family of -iz-, -izzle and -izzo constructions that Snoop Dogg made globally famous in the early 2000s. That style is much older than Snoop. Lexicographers trace it to a cant used in the 1970s, with the -iz- infix developing among African American communities around the era of the Harlem Renaissance, with hotspots in Oakland, New York and Philadelphia. Part of its origin is beautifully practical: girls improvising jump-rope chants used -iz- to add a syllable when the rhythm needed one. It first reached record on Frankie Smith's 1981 single "Double Dutch Bus."

So when a Toronto teenager in the mid-2000s turned Drake into Drizzy, he was doing something that had been in the air for thirty years. It is not a mystery so much as a default setting for the era.

What we can say for certain is that it is the oldest one. Drizzy is the name that survives from before the money, before the label, before Toronto had a nickname. Anyone who confidently tells you which specific friend coined it on which specific afternoon is doing creative writing.

What does OVO stand for?

OVO stands for October's Very Own.

That is the answer, and it is worth being precise about the rest, because this is the one people ask about most and the one that gets explained worst.

October's Very Own is the umbrella name for Drake's whole operation. It covers OVO Sound, the record label he runs with producer Noah "40" Shebib and manager Oliver El-Khatib; the OVO clothing line, launched in 2011 and now a full retail business; and OVO Fest, the Toronto concert franchise.

The lineage is traceable. Drake self-released his debut mixtape Room for Improvement on February 14, 2006, under an imprint called All Things Fresh. That imprint became October's Very Own. By 2007 he was releasing his second mixtape, Comeback Season, on the newly named label, and for years afterward the October's Very Own blog was where his music first appeared — "Marvins Room" premiered there in June 2011 before it was a certified hit.

Now the October. Drake was born on October 24, and he has repeatedly made that date load-bearing: he announced the More Life project and dropped four new songs on October 24, 2016. The birthday connection is the universally reported explanation for the name and it fits the evidence exactly. It is worth noting for accuracy's sake that neither Drake nor the brand has published a formal etymology, so treat "October equals his birth month" as extremely well supported rather than officially confirmed.

The "Very Own" half is the part people skip, and it is the part that explains the whole business. It is a possessive. It means: this month, this city, this crew, mine. Every OVO product since has been an argument for that sentence.

While we are here, the other name on the OVO letterhead has a better origin story than most rappers manage. Noah James Shebib, born March 31, 1983, is known to the world as 40, and the nickname comes from "40 Days & 40 Nights" — a reference to how long he would stay in the studio without sleeping, eventually shortened to the number. He met Drake in 2005 as a recording and mixing engineer. Three days in, he committed to working with him exclusively and announced they were "going to take over the world together." That is either the most accurate prediction in modern music or an extremely lucky guess, and either way it is a better nickname origin than Drizzy has.

Why is the OVO logo an owl?

Because O-V-O is also, if you squint, a face. Two eyes and a beak.

The owl silhouette has become one of the most recognizable logos in music, and its reach is genuinely absurd for a rapper's clothing line. In October 2022, FC Barcelona swapped out the logo of their shirt sponsor, Spotify, and wore the OVO owl on the front of their jerseys for El Clásico against Real Madrid on October 16. Spotify, per the club, "has given this privileged space on the jersey as part of the framework of the partnership with the Club."

A record label logo replaced a multibillion-dollar streaming company's logo on the shirt of one of the biggest football clubs on earth. Whatever an owl is supposed to mean, it means that now.

Why is Drake called the 6 God, and what does "the 6" mean?

This is the section where most explainers pick one theory and get it half right. Drake has answered it, and the answer is: both.

On The Tonight Show in 2016, he explained that "the 6" derives from the shared digits of Toronto's 416 and 647 telephone area codes and from the six municipalities that were amalgamated into the current City of Toronto on January 1, 1998. Those six were the old City of Toronto, Etobicoke, York, North York, East York and Scarborough. The amalgamation was deeply unpopular at the time — a 1997 referendum went better than three to one against it — but the six-part structure was already civic iconography. The former Metropolitan Toronto used a symbol of six interlocking rings, one per municipality.

So the nickname works on two levels simultaneously: a phone number and a city map. Torontonians recognize both instantly.

Drake also did not invent it, and he says so plainly. Asked about the term by Nardwuar in an interview published in May 2016, he credited two fellow Torontonians: "Oliver had come up with it but yeah, I give all the credit to Jimmy. He was definitely part of that process." Jimmy Prime, born Gordon Edward Phillips III in 1992, is a Toronto rapper and the frontman of Prime Boys, and is widely credited with coining the term. Versions of it were floating around Toronto rap in the early 2000s before that.

What Drake did was scale it. He announced his fourth album as Views From The 6 in July 2014, drove the phrase hard through 2015's If You're Reading This It's Too Late, and shipped the finished album as Views in 2016. Within about eighteen months a piece of local slang became a globally understood synonym for a city of three million people. Dictionary.com's entry notes, correctly and a little cruelly, that most Torontonians still just call it Toronto.

"6 God," then, is the natural escalation. If the city is the 6, and you are the one who exported it, the title writes itself. It is also a song — track seven on If You're Reading This It's Too Late, released February 13, 2015. Best detail in the entire Drake catalogue: the beat samples "Haunted Chase," composed by David Wise for the Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest soundtrack. He declared himself a deity over a Super Nintendo cue. That is the most Drake thing that has ever happened.

Why is Drake called Champagne Papi?

Because he made an Instagram account in 2011 and picked a handle that turned out to be a whole personality.

Drake registered @champagnepapi in 2011, and the persona hardened over the next couple of years as his style and sound absorbed West Indian influence. The two halves do exactly what they look like they do. Papi is Spanish slang for daddy or dude, carrying a specific flavor of Caribbean swagger. Champagne is not a literal drink order so much as a register: expensive, celebratory, romantic, faintly ridiculous on purpose.

The chronology is the good part. The nickname came first by nearly a decade. Drake did not launch his own champagne, Mod Selection, until 2019, and his bourbon whiskey Virginia Black arrived in 2016. He called himself Champagne Papi years before he had any champagne to sell, then went out and bought the noun. It is also an official alias, not just a fan tag: music databases list both Champagne Papi and C. Papi as credited performance names.

Why is Drake called The Boy?

Of all his nicknames, this is the one with the least documentation and the most confidence behind it. There is no interview where Drake explains it, and we are not going to invent one.

What we can say is what it does. Every other name in this article is doing promotional work. Drizzy is playful, 6 God is a claim on a city, Champagne Papi is a whole lifestyle, October's Very Own is a business. The Boy is the opposite of all of that. It is deliberately plain — no geography, no flex, no persona. It functions the way a nickname works inside a group of friends who no longer need to specify. There is only one boy being discussed.

It is used as shorthand by OVO and by his audience, and it is arguably the most confident name in the set, precisely because it refuses to describe anything. A rapper who calls himself the 6 God is telling you how big he is. A rapper who calls himself The Boy is assuming you already know.

It also has a neat symmetry with where he started. The first thing anyone in Toronto knew him as was a kid on a teen soap. Two decades on, the nickname his own camp uses is still, essentially, "the kid." Rap is full of artists who spent their careers trying to sound older than they were. Drake got old enough to make the diminutive sound like a title, which is roughly the same move the entire Lil generation pulled off by accident.

One artist, seven names

Add them up and you get a fairly complete map of a career. The government name he was born with. The teenage stretch of it. A city he adopted and then exported. A month he turned into a company. A drink he named himself after and later manufactured. And a two-word nickname that says nothing at all, which he can only get away with because everything else already said it.

That is the same trick rap has been running since the beginning, just executed at unusual scale. For the deeper mechanics, see how rappers choose their names, why an entire generation of artists is named Lil something, the tangle of aliases behind Lil Wayne, and the real names hiding behind the stage names.