Word.ws English Dictionary

nonceness

nonceness noun: the quality of being a nonce word.

Noun

nonceness (uncountable)

  1. The quality of being a nonce word.
    • [see title]2000, David Crystal, “Nonceness : Lexical Innovation and Lexicographic Coverage”, in Robert Boenig, Kathleen Davis, editors, Manuscript, Narrative, Lexicon: Essays on Literary and Cultural...
    • A question that arises with nonce words is do they lose their nonceness now that they appear here. For that matter, will nonceness now appear in the OED because this could be its debut in print?2014 April 22, Paul Dickson, Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers, Bloomsbury Publishing USA, →ISBN, page 80

Origin of nonceness

From nonce + -ness.

Questions about nonceness

What does nonceness mean?
Nonceness means the quality of being a nonce word.
What part of speech is nonceness?
Nonceness is a noun.

Words near nonceness in the dictionary

  1. noncellulose
  2. noncellulosic
  3. noncellulosics
  4. noncement
  5. noncemented
  6. nonceness
  7. noncensored
  8. noncensoring
  9. noncensorious
  10. noncensorship
  11. noncensus

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nonceness (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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