Googlewhacking and Hapax Legomena

One benefit of following and occasionally being a contributor to the crossword creator community is that its full of linguistics nerds (in the nicest possible sense of the word). Thanks to them, I often find myself diving into obscure Wikipedia holes and learning fascinating new topics.

One such dive introduced me to hapax legomena: words or phrases so rare that they appear only once in a given corpus—be it a single book, an author’s complete works, or even the entire written record of a language!

Hapax legomena in ancient texts are usually difficult to decipher, since it is easier to infer meaning from multiple contexts than from just one. For example, many of the remaining undeciphered Mayan glyphs are hapax legomena.

Classical Chinese and Japanese literature contains many Chinese characters that feature only once in the corpus, and their meaning and pronunciation has often been lost. Known in Japanese as kogo (孤語), literally “lonely characters”, these can be considered a type of hapax legomenon. For example, the Classic of Poetry (c. 1000 BC) uses the character exactly once in the verse 「伯氏吹塤, 仲氏吹篪」, and it was only through the discovery of a description by Guo Pu (276–324 AD) that the character could be associated with a specific type of ancient flute.

I suppose the irony of a language-wide hapax legomenon is that the moment it’s studied and documented, it loses its uniqueness. It’s no longer solitary.

This reminds me of Googlewhacking, a game popular during my university years in the early 2000s. The goal was to find two words that returned exactly one Google result. It was oddly satisfying to confirm such a spot—until you shared your find on the Googlewhack website, where it was mirrored, indexed, and the rarity promptly vanished.

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