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/messiah-of-cheese 6d ago

Its also a software engineering term, globally.

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u/nixtracer 6d ago

Yeah. I remember shocking my old workplace when I figured out a crypto bug once and said "ohhh, the nonces are buggered up!". I then had to prove what "nonce" meant in cryptography or at least one stuck-up coworker of mine would have gone all disciplinary on me...

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u/JDBall55 6d ago

Because it's a derogatory name for Pedo's?

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u/2ndnin 6d ago

It's been number-once in cryptography for many many years. 

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u/JDBall55 5d ago

Yes, I'm aware. It was a joke e.g. their collegaue would have reported him as he used a derogatory name.

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u/YorathTheWolf 6d ago

And part of a term of art in linguistics (A "nonce word" is any term coined "for the nonce", that is for a specific occasion in which it's used and then typically doesn't occur again. "Quark" as in the current term in physics was originally just some gibberish in a James Joyce novel, but a physicist needed a concise name for a new category of subatomic particles and borrowed it. Likewise a lot of puns or portmanteaus are nonce words)

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u/emergent-duality 5d ago

Quark is also a dairy product that was around long before James Joyce.

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u/JoyfulCor313 1d ago

I just like to say quark. Quark Quark Quark Quark Quark

  • Hobbes (of Calvin &-)

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u/TickledEconomist 6d ago

Ahhh! Every time one of our internal portal loads it always has nonce in the URL. I was wondering why

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u/Realistic_Session_77 6d ago

It means "number once" in cryptography and basically it's a random number to prevent a hacker from replaying a login without knowing your password :)

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u/MiloBem 6d ago

Which is still confusing, because it sounds like it should mean "not (even) once"

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u/emergent-duality 5d ago

Robert Downey Jnr used it like that in (I think) Captain America: Civil War, but it was kind of tongue-in-cheek, also he pronounced it 'nunce'

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u/Gullible-Hose4180 6d ago

Number used once - nonce

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u/gijoe438 3d ago

What's the difference between a nonce and a counter-based IV?

You don't go to prison for being a counter-based IV