A nonce word is a word used only “for the nonce”—to meet a need that is not expected to recur. Quark, for example, was a nonce word in English appearing only in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake until Murray Gell-Mann quoted it to name a new class of subatomic particle. The use of the term nonce word in this way was apparently the work of James Murray, the influential editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.~ Nonce word - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia