nonesuch

12 October 2026

A nonesuch, or nonsuch, is something that is unparalleled, without equal. The word, rare today, dates to the sixteenth century, although the use of a negated such, as in no such, goes back to Old English.

The nominal use of nonesuch stems from Nonsuch Palace, a grand building whose construction was started by Henry VIII in 1538, but which was not completed during his lifetime. The palace, intended to showcase the grandeur of the Tudor dynasty, was located in Nonsuch Park, which straddles the border between greater London and Surrey.

We see reference to the 1538 construction project in the crown’s payment records for that year:

Sir Fras. Bryan, on warrant of 17 Nov., “for taking of one thousand quick deer within the divers the King’s parks, for the replenishing of the parks of Nonesuch and Kinton,” 166l. 13s. 4d.

And use as a general noun, albeit as an open compound, dates to 1589 when Robert Greene uses it in his Menaphon:

Beleeue me shepheard, her eyes were like the fierie torches tilting against the Moone: this paragon, this none such, this Eaw, this Mistres of our flockes, was by a wily Foxe stolne from our foldes; for which these shepheards assemble themselues, to recouer so wealthie a prize.

And we see in in Nathaniel Fairfax’s 1674 A Treatise of the Bulk and Selvidge of the World, where it is used to denote the earth and creation:

Though the thing we are upon be so a Nonesuch, that there is no other thing in being, or can be, to which we may fully liken it, yet some things there are by our looking unto which, the understanding, I think, will a little the better cope with this.

Nonsuch Palace stood until the late seventeenth century. Charles II gave it to his mistress, Barbara Villiers, the Countess of Castlemaine, who had it pulled down starting in 1682 and the materials sold off to pay her gambling debts. Demolition was complete by 1690.

Sources:

Fairfax, Nathaniel. A Treatise of the Bulk and Selvidge of the World. London: Robert Boulter, 1674, 175. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Gairdner, James, ed. Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic of the Reign of Henry VIII, vol. 13, part 2. (London: Stationary Office, 1893). Vaduz: Kraus Reprint, 1965, 536. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Greene, Robert. Menaphon, London: Thomas Orwin for Sampson Clarke, 1589, sig. Ir. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary Online, December 2003, s.v. nonsuch, n. & adj.; 1915, s.v. such, adj. & pron.

Image credit: Joris (Georg) Hoefnagel, 1568. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.