Nonce word

For other uses, see Nonce (disambiguation).

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.[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 words wug and blicket for instance were invented by researchers to be used in child language testing.[4] Nonsense words often share orthographic and phonetic similarity with (meaningful) words,[5] as is the case with pseudowords, which make no sense but can still be pronounced in accordance with a language's phonotactic 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 for brain 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 from James Murray, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.[8]: 25  Some analyses consider nonce words to fall broadly under neologisms, which are usually defined as words relatively recently accepted into a language's vocabulary;[9] other analyses do not.[3]

  1. ^ "Nonce Word". Cambridge Dictionaries Online. 2011. Retrieved 6 November 2012.
  2. ^ a b The Cambridge Encyclopedia of The English Language. Ed. David Crystal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 132. ISBN 0521401798
  3. ^ a b Crystal, David. (1997) A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics (4th Edition). Oxford and Cambridge (Mass., USA): Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
  4. ^ Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2001, p. 388
  5. ^ Raymond M. Klein; Patricia A. McMullen (1999). Converging Methods for Understanding Reading and Dyslexia. MIT Press. pp. 67–68. ISBN 978-0-262-11247-5.
  6. ^ Natalie Wilson Rathvon (2004). Early Reading Assessment: A Practitioner's Handbook. Guilford Press. p. 138. ISBN 978-1-57230-984-5.
  7. ^ Muriel Deutsch Lezak (2004). Neuropsychological Assessment 4e. Oxford University Press. p. 596. ISBN 978-0-19-511121-7.
  8. ^ Mattiello, Elisa. (2017). Analogy in Word-formation : a Study of English Neologisms and Occasionalisms. Berlin/Boston, GERMANY: De Gruyter Mouton. ISBN 978-3-11-055141-9. OCLC 988760787.
  9. ^ Malmkjaer, Kirsten. (Ed.) (2006) The Routledge Linguistics Encyclopedia. eBook edition. London & New York: Routledge, p. 601. ISBN 0-203-43286-X