Dictionary

orthonym en · NOUN

Etymology

From ortho- + -onym.

Meanings

1. The real name of a person who uses a pseudonym.
   • “Samuel Langhorne Clemens” is the orthonym of “Mark Twain”.
   • A pseudonym (literally “false name”) is a name that differs from an original orthonym (“true name”), and as popularly understood is a new name that a person assumes for a particular purpose. 2010, Adrian Room, Dictionary of Pseudonyms, →ISBN:
   • As such, the body of the collection is organic, housing a wide variety of heteronymic voices critically speaking to one another to enrich the overall complexity and yet unified wholeness of the orthonym that becomes the final product. 2010, Peter M. Beattie, 'ReCapricorning' the Atlantic, →ISBN:
   • “No sólo ser otro sino escribir la obra de otro” [“Not Only Being Other but Also Writing the Work of the Other”] thus engages Pessoa's poem “Autopsicografia” — attributed to the orthonym “Fernando Pessoa” — in a way that draws from the larger imaginary of Pessoa's notion of "channeling oneself," since Pessoa's poem's title, as Darlene Sadlier suggests, is "derived from the Portuguese psicografia [and] refers to the occult practice of writing through the suggestion or action of a spirit medium." 2014, Scott Weintraub, Juan Luis Martínez’s Philosophical Poetics, →ISBN, page 155:
2. The correct word for a concept in a specified language.
   • To perform a series of pragmatic functions, to find the 'right word' (the orthonym) or to fill the gap of words s/he doesn't know, that are momentarily not accessible or that may not even exist in the matrix language, s/he will switch to the embedded language. 2003, Georges Lüdi, “Code-switching and Unbalanced Bilingualism”, in Bilingualism: Beyond Basic Principles:
   • This technique is illustrated by Example Two (Figure 6) where the non-native speaker (NNS) is searching for the orthonym, proposes a German word which is then translated by one of the native speakers (NS) of French. 2002, Daniel W.C. So, Gary M. Jones, Education and Society in Plurilingual Contexts, →ISBN, page 13:
   • In a similar way, we may interpret the evolution from lexical code-switching to borrowing as a change in the interpretation of the status of the lexical form in the sense that it is considered an orthonym not only in bilingual settings ('the right word comes from the other language and therefore I code-switch'), but also in monolingual ones ('there is a proper word in another language and therefore I propose to introduce it as a "guest word" in the respective monolingual lexicon'). In other terms, a "foreign" element can be a borrowing from its very first occurrence if it is intended and interactively accepted as the orthonym in a monolingual setting. 2004, Ulrich Ammon, Sociolinguistics, →ISBN, page 349:

Forms

Antonyms

stage name · nom de plume · mistranslation · pen name · nom de guerre · allonym · pseudonym · alias

Relateds

orthonymous · anonymous · autonymous

Synonyms

autonym · alethonym