Ahapax legomenon(often abbreviate just to hapax ) is a parole which come out only once – in a spoken language , a single write oeuvre , or the entire eubstance of work of a give author . According to Wikipedia : " Hapax legomenon is a transliteration of Greek ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? , mean ' ( something ) said ( only ) once . ' "
Hapaxes are everywhere , particularly in historical text – indeed , many of the remaining untranslated hieroglyphs appear to be hapaxes , possibly because we miss enough text to see them more frequently – or perhaps because they are unparalleled Logos ; it ’s hard to enjoin the difference . I in brief interned with a professor at Florida State who had a database of such terms of Mayan origin ; sorting it by frequency revealed a depressingly large number of individual - appearance terms .
Wikipedia gives us some good English example , including one from Shakespeare : Honorificabilitudinitatibus , which can apparently be translated as " the DoS of being able to attain honors " ; plainly it ’s faster and easy just to say " honorificabilitudinitatibus , " which , for the phonograph record , my spell - checker recognizes as a valid word . Honorificabilitudinitatibus appear only once in Shakespeare ’s work , inLove ’s Labour ’s Lost . W.P. Workman count the number of hapaxes in various bodies of study ( include Biblical whole shebang ) , render significant division in the number both of hapaxes per play , as well as hapaxes per page ( Workman dissect the Irving volumes of Shakespeare ) ; here ’s a diagram showing some results :
scan moreon hapaxes from Wikipedia , include this nugget of trivia from the Greek : " aphedron’latrine ' was a hapax legomenon thought to signify ' bowel ' until an lettering was found in Pergamos . " Ahem .
