A hapax legomenon (pronounced /ˈhæpɨks lɨˈɡɒmənɒn/ or /ˈheɪpæks/[1]) (pl. hapax legomena, sometimes abbreviated to hapaxes) is a word which occurs only once in either the written record of a language, the works of an author, or in a single text. While technically incorrect, the term is also sometimes used of a word that occurs in only one of an author's works, even though it occurs more than once in that work. Hapax legomenon is a direct transliteration from the Greek form ἅπαξ λεγόμενον, meaning "[something] said [only] once".
The related terms dis legomenon, tris legomenon, and tetrakis legomenon refer respectively to double, triple, or quadruple occurrences, but are far less commonly used.
Hapax legomena are quite common, as predicted by Zipf's Law,[2] which states that the frequency of any word in a work or corpus is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. For large corpora, about 40% to 60% of the words occurring are hapax legomena, and another 10% to 15% are dis legomena.[3] Thus, in the Brown Corpus of American English, about half of the 50,000 words are hapax legomena within that corpus.[4]
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