A nonce word is a lexeme created for a single occasion to solve an immediate problem of communication. Some nonce words may acquire a fixed meaning inferred from context and use, possibly even becoming an established part of the language, at which point they stop being nonce words, while others are essentially meaningless and disposable and are useful for exactly that reason. For instance in child language testing, examples of such words include "wug" and "blicket".
Lexicology
The term is used because such a word is created "". All nonce words are also neologisms, that is, recent or relatively new words that have not been fully accepted into mainstream or common use. The term nonce word in this sense is due to James Murray, the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.:25
Nonce words are sometimes used to study the development 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 in Jean 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 child 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.
Other examples
A poem by Seamus Heaney entitled "Nonce Words" is included in his collectionDistrict and Circle. Other examples of nonce words include:
Fluddle, a word reported by David Crystal 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.
Bouba and kiki, used to demonstrate a connection between the sound of words and their meaning.
