Cryptography

The thirteenth entry is il valore monouso, and English has a single word for it with a strange history behind it: « a nonce ». It began as an accident of listening. Middle English said for then anes, for the one occasion, where then was an old dative form of the article. Said quickly, the n slid across to the word after it, and writers re-divided the phrase as « for the nonce ». That is all « nonce » ever was — the fossil of a mishearing, unable to stand outside its phrase for centuries, and surviving in « a nonce word », one coined for a single occasion and never used again. Cryptography then borrowed it, and the trade now re-reads it as « number used once », which fits so neatly that most people take it for an abbreviation. Italian did none of this. Monouso is a plain compound, mono- plus uso, and it is the ordinary word on a packet of disposable plates, piatti monouso. It never changes its ending, so the plural is valori monouso.