Word.ws English Dictionary

pen-name

pen-name is the alternative form of pen name.

Meaning of pen name

Noun

pen name (plural pen names)

  1. A fictitious name used by an author in place of their actual name; a writer's pseudonym.
    • Within a week of King's acknowledging the Bachman pen name, several sources —publishers, book dealers, readers, and fans—had mentioned a number of possible other pseudonyms; obviously, if King admitted to two pen names, John Swithen and Richard Bachmann, there might be others.1998, Bill Munster, Discovering Dean Koontz, Wildside Press LLC, →ISBN, page 64
    Synonyms:
    nom de plume

Forms of pen-name

pluralpen-names

Questions about pen-name

What is pen-name the alternative form of?
Pen-name is the alternative form of pen name.

Words near pen-name in the dictionary

  1. pen-driver
  2. pen-drivers
  3. pen-friend
  4. pen-friends
  5. Pen-hsi
  6. pen-name
  7. pen-names
  8. pen-picture
  9. pen-pictures
  10. pen-pusher
  11. pen-pushers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pen-name (page history and authors); pen name (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-us-pen-name.ogg.

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