Those are nulls. Nonces are random numbers for one-time-only use

Nonce contains "once", which makes it easier to remember.

Nonce is short for "number used only once"

Once is from the Middle English "anes", meaning "one".

Nonce is from "then anes", meaning "the one".

The "-n" got smooshed into the latter word, to become "nonce", rather like "an ewt" became "newt".

It’s also UK slang for peadophile, so be careful that everyone understands you are talking about cryptography not sex offenders if you use the word in public as there could be a nasty misunderstanding!

There's a lot of vocabulary like that. I've had conversations about ensuring a daemon reaped zombie children in public before we realized what it sounded like.

Then there's a lot of master/slave terminology.

Is the term that old? I was told it literally meant N(umber)once.

Yes, the construction "for the nonce" goes back to the Middle Ages. The concept of a "nonce word" goes back to 1884, according to this article.

https://www.dailywritingtips.com/nonce-words-for-the-nonce-a...

I'm not necessarily arguing there's shared etymology, but consider 'for the nonce' - it's not merely a made up word used exclusively in cryptography.

It is also the word for a paedophile which is pretty unfortunate.

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/nonce

That was confusing for me at first when David Cross was sent to the "nonce wing" in The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret. It seemed like an odd situation to start chatting about crypto.

Cue the old protest that "root" means something vulgar in Australia, and so the Unix superuser should be named something else.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/root#Etymology_2

A "nonce word" is a word that is created to be used once. For example, if we were surfing off the coast near the Kruger National Park, we might send this tweet: "We are on Surfari!" The wikipedia entry for Cryptographic nonce says: "It is similar in spirit to a nonce word, hence the name."

Yeah, I should have said "this is the mnemonic I use to remember what it is"

Also known as a hapax legomenon.

I... don't understand how it works. Isn't the Wikipedia page listing these words essentially invalidate their "hapax legomenon" status?

Also, GP's "Surfari" doesn't sound like a word meant to be used once, but as a word meant to be funny and with high probability of becoming a piece of jargon between a band of friends. My wife & I invent words like these all the time (half of them being born from misspelling or moments of confusions). Are they "nonces" too, even though we keep using them?

A hapax legomenon is a hapax legomenon with reference to a particular corpus. In this context, a "corpus" is a set of words, or more generally a set of works under consideration.

Any corpus of one word is, by construction, composed entirely of of hapax legomena. I think the wikipedia page is fairly clear on the subject, honestly. In general, they're a phenomenon which is fairly obvious and uninteresting.

Where it becomes slightly more interesting is when, in some long text, an author uses a word the no one knows, and doesn't bother to explain it, and never uses it again. It becomes particularly interesting when trying to translate important ancient texts... what the devil did this word really mean?

Which is also a fish creature from the web comic Narbonic.

Nonce isn't short for anything. It's a word, like "number" or "short".