The 1938 paper that first widely publicized the property of tabulated numbers now known as Benford's law, the first digit law, the first digit phenomenon, or the leading digit phenomenon, used the term "The Law of Anomalous Numbers" to describe it (Benford 1938).
The term "anomalous number" may also be used to refer to a number such as 
that exhibits anomalous cancellation (i.e.,
"cancelling" the 6 gives the correct result 
.)
