Nonce word

In linguistics, a nonce word—also called an occasionalism—is any word (lexeme), or any sequence of sounds or letters, created for a single occasion or utterance but not otherwise understood or recognized as a word in a given language. Nonce words have a variety of functions and are most commonly used for humor, poetry, children's literature, linguistic experiments, psychological studies, and medical diagnoses, or they arise by accident.

Some nonce words have a meaning at their inception or gradually acquire a fixed meaning inferred from context and use, but if they eventually become an established part of the language (neologisms), they stop being nonce words. Other nonce words may be essentially meaningless and disposable (nonsense words), but they are useful for exactly that reason—the words wug and blicket for instance were invented by researchers to be used in child language testing. Nonsense words often share orthographic and phonetic similarity with (meaningful) words, as is the case with pseudowords, which make no sense but can still be pronounced in accordance with a language's phonotactic rules. Such invented words are used by psychology and linguistics researchers and educators as tools to assess a learner's phonetic decoding ability, and the ability to infer the (hypothetical) meaning of a nonsense word from context is used to test for brain damage. Proper names of real or fictional entities sometimes originate as nonce words.

The term is used because such a word is created "for the nonce" (i.e., for the time being, or this once), coming from James Murray, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. Some analyses consider nonce words to fall broadly under neologisms, which are usually defined as words relatively recently accepted into a language's vocabulary; other analyses do not.

Types of nonce words

A variety of more specific concepts used by scholars falls under the umbrella of nonce words, of which overlap is also sometimes possible:

nonsense word: a nonce word that is meaningless unless it follows the phonology of a particular language

nonword: a nonsense word that is not pronounceable in a particular language

pseudoword: a nonsense word that still follows the phonotactics of a particular language and is therefore pronounceable, feeling to native speakers like a possible word (for example, in English, blurk is a pseudoword, but bldzkg is a nonword); thus, pseudowords follow a language's phonological rules but have no meaning

ghost word: a nonce word authoritatively described in a reference work that turns out to have originated from a typo or other simple error

protologism: a nonce word that has achieved repeated usage, perhaps even by a small group but not beyond that (an intermediate step towards a neologism)

stunt word: a nonce word intentionally coined to demonstrate the creator's cleverness or elicit an emotional reaction, such as admiration or laughter; such words are often noted in the works of Dr.