False title
grammatical construct in English
A false, coined, fake, bogus or pseudo-title, also called a Time-style adjective and an anarthrous nominal premodifier, is a kind of preposed appositive phrase before a noun predominantly found in journalistic writing. It formally resembles a title, in that it does not start with an article, but is a common noun phrase, not a title. An example is the phrase convicted bomber in "convicted bomber Timothy McVeigh", rather than "the convicted bomber Timothy McVeigh".
Some usage writers condemn false titles, and others defend it. Its use was originally American, but it has become widely accepted in some other countries. In British usage it was generally confined to tabloid newspapers but has been making some headway on British websites in recent years.
Terminology
In the description of a false title as an anarthrous nominal premodifier, "anarthrous" means "lacking an article", and "nominal" is used in the sense "of the nature of a noun". Other phrases for the usage include "pseudo title", "coined title" and "preposed appositive".
In "Professor Herbert Marcuse", "Professor" is a title, while in "famed New Left philosopher Herbert Marcuse", "famed New Left philosopher" has the same syntax, with the omitted at the beginning, but is not a title. The linguist Charles F. Meyer wrote that "pseudo-titles" differ from titles in providing a description rather than honoring the person (and that there are gray areas, such as "former Vice President Dan Quayle").
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5432738. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “False title” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.