Hapax legomenon
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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 (גבינה-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.
- Wimble, a word that appears in James Joyce's Ulysses (U 7.1071) and which Joyce told Stuart Gilbert was an hapax legomenon. The Oxford English Dictionary lists a Yorkshire-Lancashire dialect usage of wimble as "active, nimble" but the sense that Joyce seems to intend is "giddy, confused".
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, more specifically, 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.
