Originally Posted By: Faldage
 Originally Posted By: The Pook

I'm familiar with the etymological fallacy (though it is more often applied to modern misunderstandings of ancient words). However, I wasn't aware that 'anonym' actually had a usage yet. I thought it was just a made up word, in which case all I had to go on is the lexical meaning of its component parts, which I think was the definition someone gave, wasn't it?


B&M OED gives an 1812 citation for the meaning '[a] person whose name is not given, who remains nameless.' The earliest citation for the synonym of pseudonym is 1865.


Ah, so it's a person, not a name. It's more like the terms ghostwriter or proxy or absentee than the term pseudonym - in that it describes the state of a person, not the name they take (or don't take).