The words "paracrystallinity" and "paracrystal" were coined by the late Friedrich Rinne in the year 1933. Their German equivalents, e.g. "Parakristall", appeared in print one year earlier.
A general theory of paracrystals has been formulated in a basic textbook, and then further developed/refined by various authors.
Rolf Hosemann's definition of an ideal paracrystal is: "The electron density distribution of any material is equivalent to that of a paracrystal when there is for every building block one ideal point so that the distance statistics to other ideal points are identical for all of these points. The electron configuration of each building block around its ideal point is statistically independent of its counterpart in neighboring building blocks. A building block corresponds then to the material content of a cell of this "blurred" space lattice, which is to be considered a paracrystal."