Entertainment / Literature / Hapax Legomenon: (pluralhapax legomena): Any word of indeterminate meaning appearing only once in the surviving textual records of an ancient language. The word's rarity makes it difficult for modern scholars to figure out its meaning by context. Several words in Anglo-Saxon poetry and in the Bible, for example, are hapax legomena. In fact, somewhere between 1501 and 2400 words in the Bible fall into this category, depending upon how strictly we define the term, as Frederick Greenspahn notes in Hapax Legomena in the Hebrew Bible (Ann Arbor, MI): 22-41. The Book of Hosea alone has nine such untranslatable terms in the space of 263 lines as Greenspahn points out in an article from Volume 30 of Vetus Testamentum (17).
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