What is "hapax legomenon"

(plural legomena), "word occurring only once," Greek, literally "once said," from hapax "once" + legomenon, neuter passive present participle of legein "to say."

n. A word occurring only once in a given corpus.

n. a word with a special meaning used for a special occasion [syn: nonce word]

In corpus linguistics, a hapax legomenon ( also or ; pl. hapax legomena; sometimes abbreviated to hapax, pl. hapaxes) is a word 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, even though it occurs more than once in that work. Hapax legomenon is a transliteration of Greek ἅπαξ λεγόμενον, meaning "(something) said (only) once".

The related terms dis legomenon, tris legomenon, and tetrakis legomenon respectively (, , ) refer to double, triple, or quadruple occurrences, but are far less commonly used.

Hapax legomena are quite common, as predicted by Zipf's law, 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. Thus, in the Brown Corpus of American English, about half of the 50,000 words are hapax legomena within that corpus.

Hapax legomenon refers to a word's appearance 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.