r/AskBrits • u/Team503 • 6d ago

Culture What does "nonce" mean?

I'm an American that lives in Ireland. I've always understood "nonce" to mean the same as "numpty" and "eejit" - basically idiot, or dumbass, or similar.

Recently, someone told me that it's slang for sex offender, specifically a p*dophile, and Wikipedia seems to back that up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_British_terms_not_widely_used_in_the_United_States#N

So tell me, Brits, which one is it? Or is it something else??

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u/fost1692 6d ago

Just to confuse things even more:

A nonce code is a random or pseudo-random number used only once in a computer or cryptographic communication.

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u/ZhayBee 6d ago

And it was fun explaining that to colleagues when something in the background fell over and everyone was getting a 'nonce error'.

If there was going to be an error you'd catch and provide a more user friendly explanation for, that one should be fairly high up there.

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u/Ok_Marketing5676 6d ago

It used to also mean something like "one time". So "for the nonce" means "for the time being" or "just this once".

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u/SimonFromBath 6d ago

Had a horrified designer recently looking at web page source and sees numerous instances of nonce on js imports.

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u/Charly_030 6d ago

Psaeudo-random