Definition:
The name of a person (usually a historical person) assumed by a writer as a pen name or alias. See also: Pseudonym.
Etymology:
From the Greek, "other" + "name"Examples and Observations:
- "An example of a work written under an allonym is The Federalist, also known as The Federalist Papers. This collection of 85 essays about the U.S. Constitution was written by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison in 1787-1788. They chose to write under the name Publius in honor of a Roman official for his role in setting up the Roman republic."
(Anu Garg, The Dord, the Diglot, and an Avocado or Two, Plume Book, 2007) - "At about the same time I left the Church, I started being self-conscious about being gay. . . . And being conscious of this fact was less a problem than a challenge: how to act on it without being caught, how to live with it without being Known As Such. It's no wonder my first short story dealt with a single man who wrote stories under another name--not a pseudonym but an allonym, the borrowed name of an actual person. It was my age of disguising."
(J.D. McClatchy, "My Fountain Pen," in Boys Like Us, edited by Patrick Merla, Avon, 1996) - "Her name was Diane and I had known her intermittently for about a year. I had never flown with her, having met her in the Atlanta airport terminal, and she knew me under the alias Robert F. Conrad, a Pan-Am first officer, an allonym I used on occasion."
(Frank W. Abagnale and Stan Redding, Catch Me If You Can, Random House, 2000) - "Personal identity became an issue again later when [Tarchetti] adopted the allonym Ugo in
deference to Ugo Foscolo, the Romantic writer whose misanthropic and sensitive spirit Tarchetti so arduously admired."
(David Del Principe, Rebellion, Death, and Aesthetics in Italy, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996)
Pronunciation: AL-eh-nim
