Hapax Legomenon

I’m not entirely certain when I was turned onto this phrase, but it has stuck with me for quite some time. It’s been sitting as a mobile bookmark for me for at least as long as I’ve owned an iPhone, so maybe going back to 2015-ish. Hapax legomenon – it seems so exotic, and definitely hard to pronounce in casual speech.

Hapax legomenon: 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. (Definition courtesy of Wikipedia)

I think I may have been alerted to this phrase when doing a nostalgic look at Googlewhacking – trying to find a search result on google that only returns one result. Oddly enough, I do remember the first time hearing (and trying) the sport – it was the night before starting high school, and some friends and I learned about it and ended up finding a few.

I always thought the term would be a good name for a musical side-project, or an album title, but it looks like someone beat me to it.

3 responses to “Hapax Legomenon”

  1. @knovak This is exactly how Wordle makes me feel. My vocabulary is populated by weird words.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *