Depending on your literary leanings, you might think that hapax legomenon sounds like one of the Unforgivable Curses from Harry Potter or Slartibartfast’s lesser-known brother who didn’t get to design any fjords. In reality, it’s a posh way of saying something quite simple. A hapax legomenon is a word (or phrase) that appears only once in a particular text, or even only once in the entire known body of a language. Once. That’s it. It shows up, does its thing, then vanishes without even leaving a helpful footnote saying ‘by the way, this means a hat’. Rude.
words with commitment issues
The term hapax legomenon comes from Greek and literally means ‘said once’. One of the most famous hapax legomena (that’s the plural) comes from the Hebrew Bible. The word ‘tachash’ appears only once (in Exodus 25:5) and refers to a type of animal skin used to cover the Tabernacle. And because it only turns up once, no one’s completely sure what animal it was. Badger? Dolphin? Unicorn? Scholars have been arguing about it for centuries because there’s nothing else to compare it with.
(Oh, and just in case you think I was making a joke with those animal suggestions, I actually wasn’t – proper academic interpretations range from a specific creature like a dugong, dolphin or seal due to links to Arabic words, to a unique one-horned, multi-coloured animal created miraculously for the Tabernacle, which then disappeared forever. Just like hapax legomena.)
Shakespeare is another rich source of one-hit wonders – he’s actually credited with hundreds of words that appear only once in his work, leaving scholars to argue for centuries about whether he invented them, spelled something else wrong or was just having an off day. Like ‘honorificabilitudinitatibus’ which appears only once, in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’, presumably because he couldn’t be bothered to try to spell it again. It’s a real Latin-based word (and also the longest word in the English language to strictly alternate between consonants and vowels, fact fans), and means something like ‘the state of being able to achieve honours’. Another example is ‘puking’, which turns up in ‘As You Like It’ and only ‘As You Like It’ (I guess he didn’t like it). Of course, ‘puking’ is very familiar now, but its first recorded use in English is Shakespeare’s, and it appears only that one time in his work.
In praise of words that couldn’t commit
Hapax legomena are linguistic butterflies – brief, baffling and often beautiful. They remind us that language isn’t neat or fully documented, and that sometimes a word pops into existence, waves politely then disappears forever.