Hapax legomenon

Uncommon card · No. 89118

In corpus linguistics, a hapax legomenon ( also or ; pl. hapax legomena; sometimes abbreviated to hapax, plural hapaxes) is a word or an expression 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 also sometimes 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 "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...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Radagast3, Public domain