Alcofribas

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A pen name adopted by the sixteenth-century French satirist François Rabelais, an anagram of his own name, under which he published his works
2. The pseudonym that the French Renaissance author Rabelais used as narrator and writer of his comic novels about giants
3. An anagrammatic pen name used by the French writer Rabelais, a literary alias linked to his satirical books of the 1500s

Etymology: Alcofribas Nasier is the pen name François Rabelais used on the title page of his satirical work "Pantagruel" (1532), and the name is an anagram of his own: drop the "Nasier" surname, and "Alcofribas" letters rearrange into "François Rabelais" with the letters of the first name and surname distributed across the two words. Rabelais often wrote under such playful disguises, and the trick was a favourite of Renaissance humanists who enjoyed hiding identities inside wordplay. The name became more than a disguise. Because Rabelais was prosecuted by the Sorbonne and his books were condemned, the anagram let him keep writing while leaving readers a puzzle to solve. The word "alcofribas" survives today almost entirely as a literary curiosity, recalled in histories of satire and in discussions of pseudonymity, and it is a rare case of an author's alias outlasting the book it first appeared on.