Hapax legomenon
In corpus linguistics, a hapax legomenon 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, but more than once in that particular work. Hapax legomenon is a transliteration of Greek ἅπαξ λεγόμενον, meaning " being said 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 distinct 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.
Significance
Hapax legomena in ancient texts are usually difficult to decipher, since it is easier to infer meaning from multiple contexts than from just one. For example, many of the remaining undeciphered Mayan glyphs are hapax legomena, and Biblical hapax legomena sometimes pose problems in translation. Hapax legomena also pose challenges in natural language processing.Some scholars consider Hapax legomena useful in determining the authorship of written works. P. N. Harrison, in The Problem of the Pastoral Epistles made hapax legomena popular among Bible scholars, when he argued that there are considerably more of them in the three Pastoral Epistles than in other Pauline Epistles. He argued that the number of hapax legomena in a putative author's corpus indicates his or her vocabulary and is characteristic of the author as an individual.
Harrison's theory has faded in significance due to a number of problems raised by other scholars. For example, in 1896, W. P. Workman found the following numbers of hapax legomena in each Pauline Epistle: Romans 113, I Cor. 110, II Cor. 99, Gal. 34, Eph. 43 Phil. 41, Col. 38, I Thess. 23, II Thess. 11, Philemon 5, I Tim. 82, II Tim. 53, Titus 33. At first glance, the last three totals are not out of line with the others. To take account of the varying length of the epistles, Workman also calculated the average number of hapax legomena per page of the Greek text, which ranged from 3.6 to 13, as summarized in the diagram on the right. Although the Pastoral Epistles have more hapax legomena per page, Workman found the differences to be moderate in comparison to the variation among other Epistles. This was reinforced when Workman looked at several plays by Shakespeare, which showed similar variations, as summarized in the second diagram on the right.
Apart from author identity, there are several other factors that can explain the number of hapax legomena in a work:
- text length: this directly affects the expected number and percentage of hapax legomena; the brevity of the Pastoral Epistles also makes any statistical analysis problematic.
- text topic: if the author writes on different subjects, of course many subject-specific words will occur only in limited contexts.
- text audience: if the author is writing to a peer rather than a student, or their spouse rather than their employer, again quite different vocabulary will appear.
- time: over the course of years, both the language and an author's knowledge and use of language will change.
There are also subjective questions over whether two forms amount to "the same word": dog vs. dogs, clue vs. clueless, sign vs. signature; many other gray cases also arise. The Jewish Encyclopedia points out that, although there are 1,500 hapaxes in the Hebrew Bible, only about 400 are not obviously related to other attested word forms.
It would not be especially difficult for a forger to construct a work with any percentage of hapax legomena desired. However, it seems unlikely that forgers much before the 20th century would have conceived such a ploy, much less thought it worth the effort.
A final difficulty with the use of hapax legomena for authorship determination is that there is considerable variation among works known to be by a single author, and disparate authors often show similar values. In other words, hapax legomena are not a reliable indicator. Authorship studies now usually use a wide range of measures to look for patterns rather than relying upon single measurements.
Computer science
In the fields of computational linguistics and natural language processing, esp. corpus linguistics and machine-learned NLP, it is common to disregard hapax legomena, as they are likely to have little value for computational techniques. This disregard has the added benefit of significantly reducing the memory use of an application, since, by Zipf's law, many words are hapax legomena.Examples
The following are some examples of hapax legomena in languages or corpora.Arabic examples
In the Qurʾān:- The proper nouns Iram, Bābil, Bakka, Jibt, Ramaḍān, ar-Rūm, Tasnīm, Qurayš, Majūs, Mārūt, Makka, Nasr, an-Nūn and Hārūt occur only once.
- zanjabīl is a Qurʾānic hapax.
- The epitheton ornans aṣ-ṣamad is a Qurʾānic hapax.
Chinese and Japanese characters
English examples
- Flother, as a synonym for snowflake, is a hapax legomenon of written English found in a manuscript entitled The XI Pains of Hell.
- Hebenon, a poison referred to in Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' only once.
- Honorificabilitudinitatibus is a hapax legomenon of Shakespeare's works.
- Manticratic, meaning "of the rule by the Prophet's family or clan" was apparently invented by T. E. Lawrence and appears once in "Seven Pillars of Wisdom."
- Nortelrye, a word for "education", occurs only once in Chaucer.
- Sassigassity, perhaps with the meaning of "audacity", occurs only once in Dickens's short story "A Christmas Tree".
- Slæpwerigne "sleep-weary" occurs exactly once in the Old English corpus, in the Exeter Book. There is debate over whether it means "weary with sleep" or "weary for sleep".
- Satyr, although a common word in English generally, is a hapax legomenon for Shakespeare as it occurs only once in his writings.
German examples
- The name of the 9th-century poem Muspilli is a back-formation from "muspille", Old High German hapax legomenon of unclear meaning only found in this text.
Ancient Greek examples
- According to classical scholar Clyde Pharr, "the Iliad has 1097 hapax legomena, while the Odyssey has 868". Others have defined the term differently, however, and count as few as 303 in the Iliad and 191 in the Odyssey.
- panaōrios, ancient Greek for "very untimely", is one of many words that occur only once in the Iliad.
- The Greek New Testament contains 686 local hapax legomena, which are sometimes called "New Testament hapaxes". 62 of these occur in 1 Peter and 54 occur in 2 Peter.
- Epiousios, translated into English as ″daily″ in the Lord's Prayer in and, occurs nowhere else in all of the known ancient Greek literature, and is thus a hapax legomenon in the strongest sense.
- The word aphedrōn "latrine" in the Greek New Testament occurs only twice, in Matthew 15:17 and Mark 7:19, but since it is widely considered that the writer of the Gospel of Matthew used the Gospel of Mark as a source, it may be regarded as a hapax legomenon. It was mistakenly translated as "bowel", until an inscription from the Lex de astynomis Pergamenorum confirmed it meant "latrine".
Hebrew examples
Some examples include:
- Akut, only appears once in the Hebrew Bible, in Psalm 95:10.
- Atzei Gopher is mentioned once in the Bible, in Genesis 6:14, in the instruction to make Noah's ark "of gopher wood". Because of its single appearance, its literal meaning is lost. Gopher is simply a transliteration, although scholars tentatively suggest that the intended wood is cypress.
- Gvina is a hapax legomenon of Biblical Hebrew, found only in Job 10:10. The word has become extremely common in modern Hebrew.
- Zechuchith is a hapax legomenon of Biblical Hebrew, found only in Job 28:17. The word derives from the root זכה z-ch-h, meaning clear/transparent and refers to glass or crystal. In Modern Hebrew, it is used for "glass."
- Lilith occurs once in the Hebrew Bible, in Isaiah 34:14, which describes the desolation of Edom. It is translated several ways.
Irish example
- chomneibi, an adjective of unknown meaning describing a lath, only appears in Triads of Ireland #169.
Italian examples
- Ramogna is mentioned only once in Italian literature, specifically in Dante's Divina Commedia.
- The verb attuia appears once in the Commedia. The meaning is contested but usually interpreted as "darkens" or "impedes". Some manuscripts give the alternative hapax accuia instead.
- Trasumanar is another hapax legomenon mentioned in the Commedia.
- Ultrafilosofia, which means "beyond the philosophy" appears in Leopardi's Zibaldone.
Latin examples
- Deproeliantis, a participle of the word deproelior, which means "to fight fiercely" or "to struggle violently", appears only in line 11 of Horace's Ode 1.9.
- Mactatu, singular ablative of mactatus, meaning "because of the killing". It occurs only in De rerum natura by Lucretius.
- Mnemosynus, presumably meaning a keepsake or aide-memoire, appears only in Poem 12 of Catullus's Carmina.
- Scortillum, a diminutive form meaning "little prostitute", occurs only in Poem 10 of Catullus's Carmina, line 3.
- Terricrepo, an adjective apparently referring to a thunderous oratory method, occurs only in Book 8 of Augustine's Confessions.
- Romanitas, a noun signifying "Romanism" or "the Roman way" or "the Roman manner", appears only in Tertullian's de Pallio.
- Arepo is a proper name only found in the Sator squares. It is derived by spelling opera backwards.
Slavic examples
- Vytol is a hapax legomenon of the known corpus of the Medieval Russian birch bark manuscripts. The word occurs in from Novgorod, dated ca. 1220–1240, in the context " vytol has been caught". According to Andrey Zaliznyak, the word does not occur anywhere else, and its meaning is not known. Various interpretations, such as a personal name or the social status of a person, have been proposed.
In popular culture
- The avant-garde filmmaker Hollis Frampton made a series of seven films from 1971 to 1972 titled Hapax Legomena I: Nostalgia to Hapax Legomena VII: Special Effects.
- 'Hapax legomenon' as a term became briefly prominent in Britain following the 2014–15 University Challenge Final, after videos went viral of Gonville and Caius student Ted Loveday swiftly giving it as a correct answer when presenter Jeremy Paxman had only managed to ask "meaning 'said only once', what two-word Greek term denotes a word...".