Word Type
nonce is a noun:
- The one or single occasion; the present reason or purpose (now only in for the nonce).
"Unsourced:" - A nonce word.
"I had thought that the term was a nonce, but it seems as if it's been picked up by other authors." - A sex offender, especially of children; a paedophile.
"That bloke who lives at number 53 is a nonce!" - A stupid or worthless person.
- A datum constructed so as to be unique to a particular message in a stream, in order to prevent replay attacks.
"In this protocol we use the serial number of the message as a nonce." - In a security engineering context, a value used only once.
Nouns are naming words. They are used to represent a person (soldier, Jamie), place (Germany, beach), thing (telephone, mirror), quality (hardness, courage), or an action (a run, a punch). Learn more →
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What type of word is nonce?
- Noun usage: Unsourced:
- Noun usage: That will do for the nonce, but we'll need a better answer for the long term.
- Noun usage: 1857, Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers, chapter 6:
- Noun usage: 'Idiot!' exclaimed the doctor, who for the nonce was not capable of more than such spasmodic attempts at utterance.
- Noun usage: I had thought that the term was a nonce, but it seems as if it's been picked up by other authors.
- Noun usage: That bloke who lives at number 53 is a nonce!
- Noun usage: In this protocol we use the serial number of the message as a nonce.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of nonce are used most commonly. I've got ideas about how to fix this but will need to find a source of "sense" frequencies. Hopefully there's enough info above to help you understand the part of speech of nonce, and guess at its most common usage.
Word Type
For those interested in a little info about this site: it's a side project that I developed while working on Describing Words and Related Words. Both of those projects are based around words, but have much grander goals. I had an idea for a website that simply explains the word types of the words that you search for - just like a dictionary, but focussed on the part of speech of the words. And since I already had a lot of the infrastructure in place from the other two sites, I figured it wouldn't be too much more work to get this up and running.
The dictionary is based on the amazing Wiktionary project by wikimedia. I initially started with WordNet, but then realised that it was missing many types of words/lemma (determiners, pronouns, abbreviations, and many more). This caused me to investigate the 1913 edition of Websters Dictionary - which is now in the public domain. However, after a day's work wrangling it into a database I realised that there were far too many errors (especially with the part-of-speech tagging) for it to be viable for Word Type.
Finally, I went back to Wiktionary - which I already knew about, but had been avoiding because it's not properly structured for parsing. That's when I stumbled across the UBY project - an amazing project which needs more recognition. The researchers have parsed the whole of Wiktionary and other sources, and compiled everything into a single unified resource. I simply extracted the Wiktionary entries and threw them into this interface! So it took a little more work than expected, but I'm happy I kept at it after the first couple of blunders.
Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: the UBY project (mentioned above), @mongodb and express.js.
Currently, this is based on a version of wiktionary which is a few years old. I plan to update it to a newer version soon and that update should bring in a bunch of new word senses for many words (or more accurately, lemma).
