hapax legomenons

A form of hapax legomenon — A word occurring only once in a given corpus.

Meanings

noun
  1. pluralrareplural of hapax legomenon

    You are producing a lot of hapax legomenons here, but don't worry, it's perfectly legal. The vowel a often became o in front of a nasal in Old English, so on- is a common variant of an-.

    2006 April 3, Alan Crozier, “Anglo-Saxon Plant-Name Survey”, in soc.history.medieval (Usenet), archived from the original on 20 Sep 2025
    5 more examples

    The only hapax legomenons of the poem occur in the first and the second lines, madárhiány ‘missing birds’ and nincs-világ ‘non-existing world’ are, in a grammatical sense, realizations of the concept of concentration.

    1999, Susanna Fahlström, “The Rhetorical-Stylistic Structure”, in Form and Philosophy in Sándor Weöres’ Poetry (Studia Uralica Upsaliensia; 32), Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, →ISBN, →ISSN, chapter 2 (The Forms of Impersonality), section 2 (Metamorphosis: A benső végtelen ‘The Infinite Inside’), page 48

    And while many people, we are sure, often use the other two in their everyday speech, their non-dictionary status means they are what kind of words? a) Neologisms b) Homonyms c) Hapax legomenons d) None of the above

    2011, E[lizabeth] Foley, B[eth] Coates, “Break Time”, in Homework for Grown-ups Quiz Book: Fiendishly Fun Questions to Test Your Old-school Knowledge, London: Square Peg, Random House, →ISBN, pages 185–186

    The subject of this paper covers the nonce words, in other words hapaxes (or hapax legomenons) encountered in Rylands manuscript. […] Key words: Rylands manuscript interlinear translation of Qoran into Turkic, hapax legomenons, […]

    Ankara University Faculty of Language and History – Geography

    2012 April 1, Aysu Ata, “Hapax in Rylands Manuscript Interlinear Translation of Qoran into Turkic”, in Türkoloji Dergisi [Journal of Turkology], volume 19, number 1 (overall work in Turkish), Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi Dil ve Tarih-Coğrafya Fakültesi [Ankara University Faculty of Language and History – Geography], →DOI, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 06 Aug 2024, pages 2–3

    Resisting and striving are both hapax legomenons. […] Hebrews has 124 instances of hapax legomenons, more than any other NT [New Testament] book based on the number of Greek words used.

    2016 June 30, Graham Diggins, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews. […], [Bloomington, Ind.]: Xlibris, →ISBN, Hebrews 12:4 section and appendix

    Knowing what form to use when learning the representation of a word in an NLP pipeline can be a challenge for languages with rich inflectional morphology [6], where certain inflected forms may be so rare within available corpora that they manifest as hapax legomenons while their corresponding uninflected form might be quite common.

    2018, Octavia-Maria Șulea, Liviu P. Dinu, Bogdan Dumitru, “Full Inflection Learning Using Deep Neural Networks”, in Alexander Gelbukh, editor, Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing: 19th International Conference, CICLing 2018 […] (Lecture Notes in Computer Science; 13396), part I, Cham: Springer, published 2023, →DOI, →ISBN, →ISSN, page 408
Cite this entry
APA

hapax legomenons. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/hapax%20legomenons

MLA

“hapax legomenons.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/hapax%20legomenons. Accessed November 4, 2026.

Chicago

WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “hapax legomenons,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/hapax%20legomenons.

Source: hapax legomenons on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.