Oudépote Legomenon

Something never written

A hapax legomenon (Greek for “said once”) is a word that is used only once in a corpus. It is something that presents a particular challenge for the translation of ancient languages, because the meaning of a word is often deciphered by seeing how it is used in different contexts.

If you take as your corpus an individual work of sufficient length, due to consequences of Zipf’s Law, hapax legomena are quite common: 40%-60% of words used will be unique. But what happens when you broaden the corpus? And I mean broaden it way out: what are the things written only once in the English language? Paradoxically, when you increase the corpus to that size, the percentage of words which are hapaxes drops to 0%.

There are listed on Wikipedia what are supposed to be examples of hapaxes across the entire English language—that is, words which have only been written once in all of written English—however, by being listed (and therefore written) on English Wikipedia they lose their status as hapaxes. It’s also worth pointing out that a word only recorded to have ever been written once can’t really be called a word in the English language. English-wide hapaxes are really more like jokes than true unique linguistic jewels. A word can only earn its status as an official word presumably after a certain amount of colloquial usage without having the status of an official word, meaning that true hapax legomena can never exist in English, unless we allow that any made-up word written is indeed an English word, but of course that wouldn’t be consistible. But in other languages like German and Icelandic, the construction of new compound words is an official built-in feature of the language; there likely are entirely legitimate words that have only ever been written once in the entirety of all written Icelandic.

But we could broaden our concept of hapax legomena to include not just individual words but “things written” in general, meaning any unique sequence of words in a given context could be called a hapax. Now they are certain to exist, even in a context as broad as the entirety of written English. Any written work of a certain length—a novel, for instance—is a hapax: it would in its entirety represent an English construction not replicated in any context other than its own… until someone writes a postmodern novel that includes the complete text of Moby-Dick within it, or unless you consider a physical location like a library or a bookstore a context, and then there are countless instances of the text of any even modestly popular novel appearing in its entirety… There is still the possibility of a forgotten novel, only one copy of which remains, and which was never digitally transcribed: such a novel would be a true hapax.

Maybe what’s most interesting though is the minimum complexity hapax in any given context. What’s the shortest sequence of official English words that has only ever been written a single time?

You could also consider oudépote legomenon: something never written. This is easy enough to imagine. What could be the shortest, syntactically valid sequence of official English words which has never been written? Or individual words—is there a word out there exchanged only as yet verbally, ontologically burgeoning, waiting for the moment when it will finally be officialized in its first text? Some middle-school age slang, perhaps, but then again maybe not, as increasingly such words are birthed in writing online as much as or more than they are verbally.

Of course, as soon as an oudépote legomenon is written, it changes from oudépote to hapax. But we could still conceive of specific examples of these. You cold hold specific examples in your mind and say them out load without demoting their status. But what about a different thing: a thing never conceived? Of course there are things that have never been conceived, it’s very easy to conceive of such a thing. But as soon as a thing never conceived is conceived it is no longer a thing never conceived. So though there are undoubtedly infinitely many things never conceived, there are no examples of one, and there never will be.