Nonce means 'for the present time' or 'for a single occasion or purpose', although the word is not often found in general use. A dictionary may note nonce words, those for which there is only a single textual instance.
In security engineering, a nonce is a 'number used once'. It is often a random or pseudo-random number issued in an authentication protocol to ensure that old communications cannot be reused in 'replay attacks'. For instance, nonces are used in HTTPdigest access authentication to calculate an MD5 digest of the password. The nonces are different each time the 401 authentication challenge response code is presented, thus making the replay attack virtually impossible.
In the UK, the term nonce is a slang word used to refer to a sex offender, especially child sexual abusers, and thus as an insult. Folk etymologies for the origins of this word state that the word derives from Not Of Normal Criminal Ethos, used to mean an offender whose motivation was different from the purely acquisitive, or possibly Not On Normal Courtyard Exercise, for prisoners that were not to be mixed with the general population for their own safety. As with most cases, these folk etymologies are examples of backronyms and should not be taken seriously. The actual origin of this word is unknown, but it is probable that it is derived from nancy, a derogatory term referring to homosexual males.
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The Nonce Journal is the handy work of five UMW students -Alissa Bourbonnnais, Alex Cardia, Kanise Carter, Liz Gerber, and Rebecca Parson- from Claudia Emerson’s The Literary Journal class.
The Nonce staff, the first of the four groups to present their work, created a literary journal over the course of a semester with submissions from over thirty-five artists from around the globe -this is not your mother’s college literary journal!
Nonce is an example of the Literary Zine of the 21st century -made for next to nothing, not necessarily tied to any one place, framed by its own generational vision of art and culture, with a unique perspective about the changing nature of peer review.
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