Word of the Day: pseudonym

pseudonym \ ˈsudənɪm \ noun

: a fictitious name that someone, often a writer, uses instead of their real name

The word pseudonym has appeared 108 times on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on March 31 in The New York Times Magazine article “Why Did This Guy Put a Song About Me on Spotify?” by Brett Martin:

Farley is 45 and lives with his wife, two sons and a cockapoo named Pippi in Danvers, Mass., on the North Shore. For the past 20 years, he has been releasing album after album of songs with the object of producing a result to match nearly anything anybody could think to search for. These include hundreds of songs name-checking celebrities from the very famous to the much less so …

… I was aware, of course, that on some level I’d been had, the one tiny fish vain enough to be snared in Farley’s trawl. It left me a bit paranoid. “Charlie Roxburgh” suddenly seemed like such a perfect Boston pseudonym that I spent a day investigating whether he was a real person. (He’s real, lives in Connecticut and makes corporate videos for his day job.) …

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