Hapax legomenon
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A hapax legomenon (pl. hapax legomena, though sometimes called hapaxes for short) is a word that occurs only once in the written record of a language, in the works of an author, or in a single text. If a word is used twice it is a dis legomenon, thrice, a tris legomenon. Beyond tetrakis legomenon (four times), a word is not rare enough to note.
Hapax legomenon is from the Greek ἅπαξ λεγόμενον "[something] said only once."
Some examples of hapax legomena in a given language or body of work are:
- Honorificabilitudinitatibus is a hapax legomenon of Shakespeare's works.
- Nortelrye, a word for "education" found once -- and only once -- in Chaucer.
- Autoguos (αυτογυος), an ancient Greek word for a sort of plough, which is found once (and exclusively) in Hesiod, the precise meaning remaining obscure.
- Panaorios (παναωριος), ancient Greek for "very untimely", one of many hapax legomena found in the Iliad.
- Flother, a synonym for snowflake is a hapax legomenon of written English pre-1900 found in a manuscript from around 1275.
- Gvina (Cheese) is a hapax legomenon of Biblical Hebrew found in Job 10:10. The word has been extremely common in Hebrew since its appearance in the Bible.
The term is popular among Bible scholars, who take the number of hapaxes in a putative author's corpus as an indication of his vocabulary and thereby argue for or against attribution. The identification of a word as a hapax by these authors means that it occurs once in the Bible or yet more narrowly, once in the New Testament.
The term hapax legomenon refers to a word's appearance in a body of text, not to its origins or prevalence in speech. It thus differs from a nonce word, which may never be recorded, or may find currency and be recorded widely, or which may appear several times in the work which coins it, and so on.de:Hapax legomenon es:Hápax fr:Hapax he: מילים יחידאיות בתנ"ך it:Hapax nl:Hapax nn:Hapax legomenon ru:Гапакс fi:Hapax legomenon
