NONCEWORD

Nonce word

A nonce word is a lexeme created for a single occasion to solve an immediate problem of communication. Quark, for example, was formerly a nonce word in English, appearing only in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Murray Gell-Mann then adopted it to name a new class of subatomic particle. Nonce words are also neologisms, but unlike neologisms, few nonce words have any particular meaning or go on to become established words. Typically, the nonce word is essentially meaningless and disposable. 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. An ...

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nonce word

Noun

  1. A word invented for the occasion.


The above text is a snippet from Wiktionary: nonce word
and as such is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

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