The word "pseudonym" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to refer to a name that someone chooses to use instead of their real name, typically for artistic or professional purposes. For example: Little is known about the author of the book except that they write under the pseudonym "John Smith".
(The group name was borrowed from Paul McCartney, who had once used the pseudonym Paul Ramon).
DH Lawrence perhaps recognised a similar sensation when, in his semi-autobiographical novel, Kangaroo (1923), Lovat – the pseudonym the author used for the book, commented upon a night-time walk in the outback, and felt overwhelmed by its peculiar vibe the land gave off.
Last November the Tory party chairman used legal threats to force a local constituent and ex-Labour councillor to delete an allegedly libellous post on a Facebook group about his use of the pseudonym and replace it with an apology that explicitly states that he was not using the Michael Green pseudonym when he was an MP.
When it was revealed that the gang rapists of a 16-year-old girl in a small Kenyan town were sentenced to cut the grass around their local police station as a punishment, outrage about the case led to two million people backing a Twitter campaign #justiceforliz – using the pseudonym given to the girl by the journalists who first reported on the rape.
However, Daisy Meadows (the pseudonym used for the writers of the Rainbow Magic children's series) remains the most borrowed author between July 2012 and June 2013.
In 2001, Percival Everett published a novel called Erasure, about a disaffected black middle-class writer and academic who writes a bitter parody under a pseudonym of the sort of stereotyped ghetto narrative he sees held up as the only truth of black life in America.
He used the pseudonym R Mutt to conceal his authorship when he sent the work to an exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York.
He started work on local newspapers at 16 and within a year was reporting Stafford Rangers' semi-professional matches in the Birmingham Combination under the pseudonym "Linesman" - and turned his back on what would have been his first scoop.
Which brings us not very neatly at all to AxxoN N, a music producer based in London, about whom little is known except that his real name is Edwin Fry and his pseudonym is an obscure reference to David Lynch's Inland Empire.
Champions of children's writing can also point to the "most-borrowed authors" chart, in which six of the top 10 places are taken by children's authors, led by Daisy Meadows, the collective pseudonym of the Rainbow Magic writers.
While it has always been argued that commenters build an identity around their pseudonym, those who express opinions under their own name carry more authority and are obviously more careful about what they say.
