I was not aware of this, thanks for giving me an explanation. I don't have any experience writing in forth, my friend described this type of language to me and I implemented it.
The more common : word enters the newly defined word into the dictionary, which is Forth speak for the newly defined word now being considered 'in scope'. The :NONAME word instead returns an execution token on the stack, which is analogous to a function pointer.
See also [2], on Forth's execution model more broadly.
[0] https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/gforth/Docs-html/Ano...