Word that only appears once in a given text or record
"Hapax legomena" redirects here. For the film series, see Hapax Legomena.
Rank-frequency plot for words in the novel Moby-Dick. About 44% of the distinct set of words in this novel, such as "matrimonial", occur only once, and so are hapax legomena (red). About 17%, such as "dexterity", appear twice (so-called dis legomena, in blue). Zipf's law predicts that the words in this plot should approximate a straight line with slope -1.
In corpus linguistics, a hapax legomenon (/ˈhæpəkslɪˈɡɒmɪnɒn/ also /ˈhæpæks/ or /ˈheɪpæks/;[1][2] pl. hapax legomena; sometimes abbreviated to hapax, plural hapaxes) is a word or an expression that occurs only once within a context: either in the written record of an entire language, in the works of an author, or in a single text. The term is sometimes incorrectly used to describe a word that occurs in just one of an author's works but more than once in that particular work. Hapax legomenon is a transliteration of Greek ἅπαξ λεγόμενον, meaning "being said once".[3]
The related terms dis legomenon, tris legomenon, and tetrakis legomenon respectively (/ˈdɪs/, /ˈtrɪs/, /ˈtɛtrəkɪs/) refer to double, triple, or quadruple occurrences, but are far less commonly used.
Hapax legomena are quite common, as predicted by Zipf's law,[4] which states that the frequency of any word in a corpus is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. For large corpora, about 40% to 60% of the words are hapax legomena, and another 10% to 15% are dis legomena.[5] Thus, in the Brown Corpus of American English, about half of the 50,000 distinct words are hapax legomena within that corpus.[6]
Hapax legomenon refers to the appearance of a word or an expression in a body of text, not to either its origin or its prevalence in speech. It thus differs from a nonce word, which may never be recorded, may find currency and may be widely recorded, or may appear several times in the work which coins it, and so on.
^"hapax legomenon". Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.)
linguistics, a hapaxlegomenon (/ˈhæpəks lɪˈɡɒmɪnɒn/ also /ˈhæpæks/ or /ˈheɪpæks/; pl. hapax legomena; sometimes abbreviated to hapax, plural hapaxes)...
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Nuncio, the apostolic and diplomatic representation of the Holy See Hapaxlegomenon, in corpus linguistics This disambiguation page lists articles associated...
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nonce terms. Wiktionary has a category on Nonce terms by language. Hapaxlegomenon Literary nonsense Metasyntactic variable Placeholder name Pseudoword...
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Britain: Penguin Group. p. 205. ISBN 0-14-043689-8. Hypotekmairei is a hapaxlegomenon, and occurs nowhere else in surviving literature. Dillon and Gergel...
Protagoras (as quoted in Plato's Theaetetus 152a). ἅπαξ λεγόμενον hápaxlegómenon "Once said" A word that only occurs once. ἀπὸ μηχανῆς Θεός apò mēkhanês...
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