[herodotus]

A "nonce word" is a word that is created to be used once. For example, if we were surfing off the coast near the Kruger National Park, we might send this tweet: "We are on Surfari!" The wikipedia entry for Cryptographic nonce says: "It is similar in spirit to a nonce word, hence the name."

[cortesoft]

Yeah, I should have said "this is the mnemonic I use to remember what it is"

[lisper]

Also known as a hapax legomenon.

[TeMPOraL]

I... don't understand how it works. Isn't the Wikipedia page listing these words essentially invalidate their "hapax legomenon" status?

Also, GP's "Surfari" doesn't sound like a word meant to be used once, but as a word meant to be funny and with high probability of becoming a piece of jargon between a band of friends. My wife & I invent words like these all the time (half of them being born from misspelling or moments of confusions). Are they "nonces" too, even though we keep using them?

[jholman]

A hapax legomenon is a hapax legomenon with reference to a particular corpus. In this context, a "corpus" is a set of words, or more generally a set of works under consideration.

Any corpus of one word is, by construction, composed entirely of of hapax legomena. I think the wikipedia page is fairly clear on the subject, honestly. In general, they're a phenomenon which is fairly obvious and uninteresting.

Where it becomes slightly more interesting is when, in some long text, an author uses a word the no one knows, and doesn't bother to explain it, and never uses it again. It becomes particularly interesting when trying to translate important ancient texts... what the devil did this word really mean?

[mcguire]

Which is also a fish creature from the web comic Narbonic.