Words & WritingGreek → English
Hapax
/ˈhæpæks/noun
A word that occurs only once in a given text or body of writing.
The Greek roots
ἅπαξ
hápax
once
λεγόμενον
legómenon
said, spoken
Literally: “said once”
The story of the word
Short for ἅπαξ λεγόμενον, said once. Alexandrian scholars editing Homer flagged the words that appear a single time in the poems, because a word with no second appearance cannot be checked against itself and its meaning has to be inferred from context alone. The problem outlived them. Several Homeric hapaxes are still argued over, and the Hebrew Bible has a few hundred of its own.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scholarly coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
legendlexicondialectprolegomenon
In a sentence
The translator flagged the hapax and offered three readings in a footnote.
Roughly half the vocabulary of any large corpus turns out to be hapaxes.