The word nickel derives from the German word Kupfernickel , which translates roughly as “Devil’s copper”.  It got that name because once in the Middle Ages, German miners found a large strike of what they thought was pure copper, but turned out to be more of a copper-nickel mixture.   This happens more frequently than you might think.   (Nickel deposits often seem more like silver, at first.)  Nickel wasn’t useless, and there was plenty of copper in the mixture, which made refining the two metals very difficult.   The extra work to make their strike economically viable reduced the value of their find, so the miners understandably cursed it, attributing the find to Nick, a mischievous sprite from German mining mythology: Nickel .   It’s from this association that in English, the Devil came to be sometimes known as Old Nick. That old devil, Nickel (artist’s rendering—no photo available). Refining copper and nickel is a lot easier with modern technology.   Nickel is