A nickname for something, which behaves in all ways as though you’d used the original name instead of the nickname. Temporary aliases are implicitly created in the loop variable for foreach loops, in the $_ variable for map or grep operators, in $a and $b during sort’s comparison function, and in each element of @_ for the actual arguments of a subroutine call. Permanent aliases are explicitly created in packages by importing symbols or by assignment to typeglobs. Lexically scoped aliases for package variables are explicitly created by the our declaration.