hapax legomenon

Rank-frequency plot for words in the novel Moby-Dick. About 44% of the distinct set of words in this novel, such as "matrimonial", occur only once, and so are hapax legomena (red). About 17%, such as "dexterity", are dis legomena (blue). Zipf's law predicts that the words in this plot should approximately fit a straight line.

Look up hapax legomenon in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

A hapax legomenon ( /ˈhæpɨks lɨˈɡɒmənɒn/ also /ˈhæpæks/ or /ˈheɪpæks/;^[1][2] pl. hapax legomena; sometimes abbreviated to hapax, pl. hapaxes) is a word which 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, even though it occurs more than once in that work. Hapax legomenon is a transliteration of Greek ἅπαξ λεγόμενον, meaning "(something) said (only) once".^[3]

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,^[4] which states that the frequency of any word in a work (corpus) is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. For large corpora, about 40% to 60% of the words (counting by type) are hapax legomena, and another 10% to 15% are dis legomena.^[5] Thus, in the Brown Corpus of American English, about half of the 50,000 words are hapax legomena within that corpus.^[6]

Note that hapax legomenon refers to a word's appearance in a body of text and to neither its origin nor its prevalence in speech. It thus differs from a nonce word, which may never be recorded, or which may find currency and may be widely recorded, or which may appear several times in the work which coins it, and so on.

Significance

Hapax legomena in ancient texts are 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 (particularly Hebrew) hapax legomena pose sometimes difficult issues in translation. Hapax legomena also pose challenges in natural language processing.^[7]

Some scholars consider Hapax legomena useful in determining the authorship of written works. For example, each of Shakespeare's plays contains a roughly similar percentage of hapax legomena not found elsewhere in his work.

P.N. Harrison, in The Problem of the Pastoral Epistles (1921)^[8] 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: Rom. 113, I Cor. 110, II Cor. 99, Gal. 34, Eph. 43 Phil. 41, Col. 38, I Thess. 23, II Thess. 11, Philem. 5, I Tim. 82, II Tim. 53, Titus 33. At first glance, the last three totals (for the Pastoral Epistles) are not out of line with the others.^[9] 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.^[9] 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 (from 3.4 to 10.4 per page of Irving's one-volume edition), as summarized in the second diagram on the right.^[9]

Apart from author identity, there are several other factors which 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.^[10]

In the particular case of the Pastoral Epistles, all of these variables are quite different from those in the rest of the Pauline corpus, and hapax legomena are no longer widely accepted as strong indicators of authorship (although the authorship of the Pastorals is subject to debate on other grounds).^[11]

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 Old Testament, only about 400 are not obviously related to other attested word forms.^[12]

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 is not a reliable indicator. Authorship studies now usually use a wide range of measures to look for patterns rather than rely upon single measurements.

Computer science

In the fields of computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP), esp. corpus linguistics and machine-learned NLP, it is common to disregard hapax legomena (and sometimes other infrequent words), 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 hapaxes.^[13]

Examples

The following are some examples of hapax legomena in languages or corpora.

Hebrew examples

• Gvina (גבינה – cheese) is a hapax legomenon of Biblical Hebrew, found only in Job 10:10. The word has become extremely common in modern Hebrew.
• Akut (אקוט – fought), only appears once in the Hebrew Bible, in Psalms 95:10.
• Lilith (לילית) occurs once in the Hebrew Bible, in Isaiah 34:14, which describes the desolation of Edom. English translates this word in several ways.
• Atzei Gopher (עֲצֵי-גֹפֶר – Gopher wood) is mentioned once in the Bible, in Genesis 6:14, in the instruction to make Noah's ark "of gopher wood". Because of the single appearance, the literal meaning is lost. Gopher is simply a transliteration, although scholars tentatively suggest that the intended wood is cypress.^[14]

Greek examples

• panaorios (παναώριος), ancient Greek for "very untimely", is one of many words which occur only once in the Iliad (Il. 24.540).
• The Greek New Testament contains 686 local hapax legomena, which are sometimes called "New Testament hapaxes"^[15], of which 62 occur in 1 Peter and 54 occur in 2 Peter.^[16]
• aphedron "latrine" was a hapax legomenon thought to mean "bowel" until an inscription was found in Pergamos.

Latin examples

• Mnemosynus, presumably meaning a keepsake or aide-memoire, only appears in Poem 12 of Catullus' Carmina.
• Deproeliantis, a participle of the word deproelior, which means "to fight fiercely" or "to struggle violently," only appears in line 11 of Horace's Ode 1.9.
• Ambacu, a word relating to a meat dish, only appears in Book 2 of Apuleius' Metamorphoses.

Arabic examples

• The proper nouns Iram (Q 89:7, Iram of the Pillars), Bābil (Q 2:102, Babylon), Bakka(t) (Q 3:96, Bakkah), Jibt (Q 4:51), Ramaḍān (Q 2:185, Ramadan), ar-Rūm (Q 30:2, Ancient Rome), Tasnīm (Q 83:27), Qurayš (Q 106:1, Quraysh), Majūs (Q 22:17, Magi), Mārūt (Q 2:102, Harut and Marut), Makka(t) (Q 48:24, Mecca), Nasr (Q 71:23), (Ḏū) an-Nūn (Q 21:87) and Hārūt (Q 2:102, Harut and Marut) occur only once in the Qurʾān.^[17]
• zanjabīl (زَنْجَبِيل - ginger) is a Qurʾānic hapax (Q 76:17).
• The epitheton ornans aṣ-ṣamad (الصَّمَد – the One besought (Names of God in the Qur'an)) is a Qurʾānic hapax (Q 112:2).

Italian examples

• Ramogna is mentioned only once in Italian literature, precisely in Dante's Divina Commedia (Purgatorio XI, 25).
• Trasumanar is another hapax legomenon mentioned in Dante's Divina Commedia (Paradiso I, 70, translated as "Passing beyond the human" by Mandelbaum).

English examples

• Honorificabilitudinitatibus is a hapax legomenon of Shakespeare's works.
• Nortelrye, a word for "education", occurs exactly once in Chaucer.
• Slæpwerigne "sleep-weary" occurs exactly once in the old-English corpus, the Exeter Book. There is debate over whether it means "weary with sleep" or "weary for sleep".
• Flother, a synonym for snowflake, is a hapax legomenon of written English before 1900^{[dubious – discuss]} and is found in a manuscript from around 1275.

See also

• Googlewhack

External links

• Open source Java software for text analysis and calculating hapax ratio ( JHapax )

References