Hapax Legomena

"I prefer a weapon you only have to fire once."

A hapax legomenon (plural legomena) is a word only used once in a large work or system of works. For instance, Shakespeare only uses “borders” once in all his published works, in Antony and Cleopatra. The original Bible contains one instance of מִשְׁתָּאֵה, which translates to “gazing” or possibly “ogling.”

The more limited a text, the easier hapax legomena are to find. In Moby Dick, for instance, 44% of all words used in the entire novel are used only once each. The text of this essay you’re reading has 234 hapax legomena (38% of all its words). I can’t name any of those words without skewing the results, but I have boldfaced the hapax legomena in this sentence.

Talking about hapax legomena in the context of the whole English language, or all language, gets complicated fast. There’s a Heisenberg-style “observer effect” in play at that scale. I could use combining forms right now to come up with non legomena, words never published before (at least according to my Google searches)…

• Ultrasquishy (highly responsive to touch)

• Anti-Hemingwayizing (editing writing to make it feel less like Ernest Hemingway’s—with longer sentences and more adjectives, for instance)

• Calicospherical (round and three-dimensional with uneven patches of color, like some but not all planets)

• Gerwigizing (revamping with an eye toward modern women’s issues, as Greta Gerwig did with her adaptations of Little Women and Barbie)

• Sagittariusgate (the humorous “scandal” of the fact that my niece was born just four minutes into November 22nd, making her a Sagittarius, when we briefly thought she’d be a Scorpio like me and my brother. Lucy, you’re defying expectations already!)

…but now that I’ve mentioned them, I’ve turned them from non legomena into hapax legomena. And that’s just at this writing. If someone repeats any of these terms or invents them independently, they’ll become dis legomena (words used only twice), and so on. Actually, I’d be surprised if “Gerwigizing” doesn’t get some traction.

World-scale non legomena are hard to find—just coming up with these five took me close to an hour, and I discarded lots of ideas I thought would be unique that turned out not to be! World-scale hapax legomena would be even harder to find by searching, though you might stumble over some in articles like this.

After all, writers love to coin words. When those coinages are limited to a single work and talk about that work, they’re called nonce-words…although there’s no guarantee they’ll stay nonce-words.

Consider “kryptonite.” Superman’s weakness is a fictional element named for his fictional planet (Krypton). Krypton, in turn was named for a real element (krypton, #36). It was introduced not in the Superman comic book, but in the Adventures of Superman radio serial, though the comic adopted it six years later.

We could still call “kryptonite” a nonce word within the corpus of Superman stories…if it had stayed there, but it didn’t. Today, it can mean any McGuffin that makes someone unusually weak or helpless. “These chocolate sundaes are my kryptonite!” Complicating matters, a bike-lock company named itself “Kryptonite” in the 1970s. While there’s some implied connection (“locks even a superman can’t break!”), both usages don’t need to reference Superman directly.

Words are always on the move, so classifications like hapax legomenon and nonce-word are best treated as temporary labels. Even big texts like Shakespeare’s work and the Bible aren’t always 100% fixed. Edward III was added to Shakespeare’s canon in the 1990s, and there’s always the chance a new Bible translation could shake things up.

Tomorrow, a bit more on word frequency and one of the most bizarre stats I’ve ever seen.