Who Is Hapax Legomena?

In corpus linguistics, a hapax legomenon is 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.

What is Hapax Legomena in Bible?

Hapax legomenon (plural: hapax legomena; sometimes shortened to hapax) literally means “(a thing) said only once” in Greek, and it was originally used in Biblical studies to refer to a word that appears uniquely in one place in the Old or New Testament.

What is Hapax Legomena and what does it mean in the context of Beowulf?

The word æppelfealu in line 2165 of Beowulf is a hapax legomenon meaning something like “apple-brown” — it occurs nowhere else in the Old English corpus and is apparently the poet's own unique, playful way of describing the brownish-red color of bay horses.