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I ran across the word hypocoristic for the first time today, in an article on gender in languages and its relationship to sex: In several of these dialects, nouns denoting girls and unmarried women … while hypocorism/hypocoristic appear to exclusively refer to words or names), or if they are just synonyms in that usage. …

As babe used to be a common word for infants and young children, I thought it would be likely that baby is a hypocoristic form of babe, originating from baby-talk. …

I would go with pet-name as the above answers suggest, but if you wanted a single word, you can also use Hypocoristic, which can be both an adjective describing the name ("she liked the hypocristic name … he gave her") or a noun for the name itself ("he would always call her by her hypocristic"): Hypocoristic Of the nature of a pet-name; pertaining to the habit of using endearing or euphemistic …

-ette a noun suffix occurring originally in loanwords from French, where it has been used in a variety of diminutive and hypocoristic formations (brunette; cigarette; coquette; etiquette; rosette); as …

A more general term for these types of uses is hypocoristic. …

According to the OED, the s in pops is: A shortened form of the hypocoristic dim. suffix -sy, added to the same classes of words, as Babs, Toots, ducks, moms. …

The hypocoristic form of a name is, as mentioned above, a diminutive form of a name (James becomes Jim or Jimmie, Elizabeth becomes Liz, Beth, or Bettie, Robert becomes Bob or Rob or Bobbie...) but can …

This is the suffix ‑s, of which the paywalled OED says: A shortened form of the hypocoristic diminutive suffix ‑sy suffix², added to the same classes of words, as Babs, Toots; ducks (see duck n.¹ 3c), … As for the referenced ‑sy suffix, this one they explain in more detail: Hypocoristic diminutive suffix added to (i) proper names, as Betsy, Patsy, Topsy, also in the form ‑cy, as Nancy, (ii) common nouns …

According to the "blog.oxforddictionaries.com" the word of the year 2013 was selfie. It took more than a decade to this neologism to enter the Oxford Dictionary. Its origin in fact dates back at leas …

The poster and photographer, Nathan Hope, posted under the hypocoristic nickname Hopey: That's the earliest one we have written evidence for. … Instead, as cellphone photography became commonplace more than a decade ago, numerous Australians probably thought to apply the hypocoristic –ie to make selfie. …

The hypocoristic feature is absent in recent coinages, however, which are simply informal and sometimes pejorative ( boonies; cabby; groupie; hippy; looie; Okie; preemie; preppy; rookie). …

From Wikipedia: The name originally was used as a surname, which derived from Aveline, a feminine Norman French diminutive of the name Ava.[2] Ava itself is a hypocoristic Germanic name, of uncertain …

In a sense, you are describing a hypocoristic rule. Some rules have particular names. … The article notes: In late medieval England there was a much greater variety of hypocoristic or pet forms than in modern times, perhaps reflecting the competitive nature of relatively small, close-knit …

perspectives", by Richard Skala, 2006) The Oxford English Dictionary entry for pops indicates that it is formed from the clipping pop combined with a suffix -s that it says is A shortened form of the hypocoristic …

If you were to form a "hypocoristic" or "pet name" based on "reindeer", the most likely strategy would be truncation (because of the syllable count restriction mentioned in tchrist's answer) and suffixation …