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A hapax legomenon (pl. hapax legomena, though sometimes called hapaxes for short) is a word that occurs only once in a given body of text. If a word is used twice it is a dis legomenon, thrice tris legomenon. Beyond tetrakis legomenon, a word is not rare enough to call it that. The term is also used to describe a word found only once in all known writings in a given language. Some examples of these are:
- honorificabilitudinitatibus is a hapax legomenon of Shakespeare's works.
- Nortelrye, a word for "education" found only in Chaucer, and then only once.
- autoguos (αυτογυος), an ancient Greek word for a plow, found only, and only once, in Hesiod, whose precise meaning is obscure
The term is popular among Bible scholars, who take the number of hapaxes in a putative author's corpus as an indication of his vocabulary and thereby argue for or against attribution. The identification of a word as a hapax by these authors means that it occurs once in the Bible or yet more narrowly, once in the New Testament.
The term hapax legomenon refers to a word's appearance in a body of text, not to its origins or prevalence in speech. It thus differs from a nonce word, which may never be recorded, or may find currency and be recorded widely, or which may appear several times in the work which coins it, and so on.
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