hapax legomenon

A hapax legomenon, Greek for "having been said once" and "hapax" for short, is a word that occurs only once, whether in a language, a text, or the works of a particular author. The Old Testament, for example, has at least 400 unique words. (if you want a list, look here).

A hapax is a translator's nightmare. You have only one shot at getting it right, so if the word's meaning isn't clear from the single context you have to work with, you're out of luck. And, of course, there's always the possibility that what appears to be a hapax is actually the scribal equivalent of a typo. So, while there are informed guesses, no-one is really sure what kind of animal a "pygarg" is or what tree produced the "gopherwood" that Noah used to build his ark.

Anglo Saxon was a hapax-rich language with lots of ungainly words like "feolheard" (hardened by iron), "circolwyrde" (approximately mathematician) and "gop" (slave, servant) that surface once in the surviving texts and then disappear forever. "Ptyx," the best-known French hapax was apparently invented by Mallarmé for one of his poems, mostly because there just aren't that many rhymes for "Styx." And when a character in the Tempest went to fetch "young scamels from the rock," we can only imagine what he came back with.

The internet analogy to the hapax is the googlewhack, a series of words that, when googled, produces only a single result. Though if you do find a googlewhack, you'll immediately fall victim to the googlewhack paradox. You can't blog about your discovery because, once you do, it's, well, not a googlewhack anymore.


edited to add: Okay, so I was wrong. Check out the comments for several clever ways to let the whole world know about your googlewhack. Thanks, S, Zee and Manda