hapax legomenon

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a word, form, or expression that occurs only once within a given text, corpus, or the entire surviving record of a language, from the Greek meaning said only once; hapax legomena — the plural — pose significant challenges for lexicographers and translators because without multiple contextual uses it is difficult to determine a word's precise meaning, connotations, and grammatical behaviour; the Hebrew Bible contains numerous hapax legomena whose meanings have been disputed by biblical scholars for centuries, and Homer's epics include hapaxes that have generated centuries of philological debate; hapax legomena are common in ancient texts where large portions of a language's written output have not survived, and they are also produced by creative authors who coin new words used only once; computing the hapax ratio of a text — the proportion of its vocabulary appearing only once — is used in stylometric analysis of authorship