Inlinguistics, anonce word—also called anoccasionalism—is any word (lexeme), or any sequence ofsounds orletters, created for a single occasion or utterance but not otherwise understood or recognized as a word in a given language.[1][2] 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.[3] Other nonce words may be essentially meaningless and disposable (nonsense words), but they are useful for exactly that reason—the wordswug andblicket for instance were invented by researchers to be used in child language testing.[4] Nonsense words often shareorthographic andphonetic similarity with (meaningful) words,[5] as is the case withpseudowords, which make no sense but can still be pronounced in accordance with a language'sphonotactic rules.[6] 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 forbrain damage.[7]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),[2]: 455 coming fromJames Murray, editor of theOxford English Dictionary.[8]: 25 Some analyses consider nonce words to fall broadly underneologisms, which are usually defined as words relatively recently accepted into a language's vocabulary;[9] other analyses do not.[3]
A variety of more specific concepts used by scholars falls under the umbrella ofnonce words, of which overlap is also sometimes possible:
Many types of other words can also be meaningful nonce words, as is true of mostsniglets (words, often stunt words, explicitly coined in the absence of any relevant dictionary word). Other types of misinterpretations or humorous re-wordings can also be nonce words, as may occur inword play, such as certain examples ofpuns,spoonerisms,malapropisms, etc. Furthermore, meaningless nonce words can occur unintentionally or spontaneously, for instance througherrors (typographical or otherwise) or throughkeysmashes.
Nonce words are sometimes used to study thedevelopment of language in children, because they allow researchers to test how children treat words of which they have no prior knowledge. This permits inferences about the default assumptions children make about new word meanings, syntactic structure, etc. "Wug" is among the earliest known nonce words used in language learning studies, and is best known for its use inJean Berko's "Wug test", in which children were presented with a novel object, called a wug, and then shown multiple instances of the object and asked to complete a sentence that elicits a plural form—e.g., "This is a wug. Now there are two of them. There are two...?" The use of the plural form "wugs" by the children suggests that they have applied a plural rule to the form, and that this knowledge is not specific to prior experience with the word but applies to most English nouns, whether familiar or novel.[12]
Nancy N. Soja,Susan Carey, andElizabeth Spelke used "blicket", "stad", "mell", "coodle", "doff", "tannin", "fitch", and "tulver" as nonce words when testing to see if children's knowledge of the distinction between non-solid substances and solid objects preceded or followed their knowledge of the distinction betweenmass nouns andcount nouns.[13]
A poem bySeamus Heaney titled "Nonce Words" is included in his collectionDistrict and Circle.[14]David Crystal reportedfluddle, which he understood to mean a water spillage between a puddle and a flood, invented by the speaker because no suitable word existed. Crystal speculated in 1995 that it might enter the English language if it proved popular.[2]Bouba andkiki are used to demonstrate a connection between the sound of a word and its meaning.Grok, coined byRobert Heinlein inStranger in a Strange Land, is now used by many to mean "deeply and intuitively understand".[15] The poem "Jabberwocky" is full of nonce words, of which two,chortle andgalumph, have entered into common use.[15] The novelFinnegans Wake usedquark ("three quarks for Muster Mark") as a nonce word; the physicistMurray Gell-Mann adopted it as the name of asubatomic particle.[16]
