The term hapax legomenon stems from the Greek, hapax one and legomenon, said. Put it together and you have “said once”. This is applied to vocabulary which occurs so few times that defining or translating the word or phrase is complicated by the lack of contexts. You might think that the term should be kept strictly to words or phrases that can be found only once in a given language space–for example, the Hebrew Bible. But if a term happens to occur just twice and with the same context for both occurrences, the linguistic features remain the same.
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