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Nonce word
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A nonce word is a word used only "for the nonce"—to meet a need that is not expected to recur. Quark, for example, was a nonce word appearing only in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake until Murray Gell-Mann quoted it to name a new class of subatomic particle. The use of the term nonce word in this way was apparently the work of James Murray, the influential editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Nonce words frequently arise through the combination of an existing word with a familiar prefix or suffix, in order to meet a particular need (or as a joke). The result is not a non-word: although it would not be found in any dictionary, it is instantly comprehensible (e.g., bananular phone). If the need recurs (or the joke is widely enjoyed), nonce words easily enter regular use (initially as neologisms) just because their meaning is obvious.
Nonce words are often created as part of pop culture and advertising campaigns.
- Slithy, as a portmanteau of "slimy" and "lithe"; one of several used by Lewis Carroll in Jabberwocky.
- "runcible spoon", from Edmund Lear, which later came to describe a curved fork with a cutting edge.
- Unidexter - a one-legged person of the right-legged persuasion. Coined by comedian Peter Cook in One Leg Too Few.
- Aequeosalinocalcalinoceraceoaluminosocupreovitriolic, one of the English language's longest words according to the book The Dictionary, was used once in describing a particular British aquarium's water.
- Surlecultant in French, meaning that gets you to sit down in a rather vulgar manner. A rough translation would be 'onto-the-arse-ing'.
- Contrafibularity was one of several nonce words used by the fictional Edmund Blackadder to confuse the lexicographer Samuel Johnson, whom he despised.