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Anonymity as a research construct provides an important avenue for addressing fundamental communication issues related to publicness and privateness made salient by the growth in new communication technologies. As communication scholars, though, we have not yet begun to develop the models and theories that are so necessary to describe, explain, and predict anonymous communication. This essay begins by distinguishing anonymity from related notions of confidentiality, privacy and publicness, and pseudonymity, and provides some vocabulary to talk about anonymization and identification efforts by message sources and receivers. Second, the essay highlights some of the limitations of current communication scholarship in this area, and proposes a redefinition and reframing of the anonymity construct to focus on perceptions of the communicators and partial anonymity based along the dimensions of …