Word.ws English Dictionary

Alan Smithee

Alan Smithee proper noun: an official pseudonym used by film directors wishing to disown a project.

Proper noun

Alan Smithee

  1. An official pseudonym used by film directors wishing to disown a project.
    • I then watched the Alan Smithee cut, which made a great deal more narrative sense (to a Dune virgin such as myself) than the theatrical version, but was unsatisfying in other ways. Later, reading [David] Lynch's various drafts of the script gave me what may be the purest form of the film in...2014, David Hughes, “Dune (1984)”, in The Complete Lynch, Ebury Press, →ISBN

Forms of Alan Smithee

alternative formAllen Smithee

Origin of Alan Smithee

Coined by American trade union Directors Guild of America in 1968, modified from the originally proposed Al Smith to avoid confusion with real people's names.

Questions about Alan Smithee

What does Alan Smithee mean?
Alan Smithee means an official pseudonym used by film directors wishing to disown a project.
What part of speech is Alan Smithee?
Alan Smithee is a proper noun.

Words near Alan Smithee in the dictionary

  1. alampy
  2. Alams
  3. alamsoa
  4. Alamut
  5. alan
  6. Alan Smithee
  7. Alan Whicker
  8. Alan Whickers
  9. Alana
  10. Alanah
  11. alanate

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Alan Smithee (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “Alan Smithee.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/alan_smithee. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.