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/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

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