Anon

How to spell anon

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce anon

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does anon mean?

1. nounA short form of 'anonymous', used to credit a work whose author is unknown.

Anon in a sentence

• The poem in the anthology was attributed simply to anon.

• Many old folk verses are credited to anon because no writer was ever recorded.

Where does anon come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Anon comes straight from Old English, where the phrase 'on an' meant something like 'into one' or 'in one course', that is, in a single uninterrupted moment. Because the two little words were so often spoken together they fused into one adverb, and the original sense of 'straightway, at once' gradually softened into the gentler 'soon' or 'in a little while' that writers of Shakespeare's day favoured. By the time it reached early modern English it had become a stock literary word, the kind a tavern servant in a play might call out to mean 'coming right away'. In modern use it survives mainly as a deliberately old-fashioned flourish, and quite separately as the clipped form of 'anonymous', written 'anon.' beside an unattributed poem or quotation. The spelling is simple, but its archaic flavour and its double life as both an adverb and an abbreviation make it easy to overlook.

How the word is built

• on (in, into)
• an (one): literally 'in one (moment)', fused into a single adverb