Friday, October 16, 2009

Dictionary Day: Thanks, Wordnik, for Hapax Legomenon


Today is Dictionary Day, Noah Webster's birthday. This seems like a great day for a logophile like me to bring you all sorts of great, obscure words. But I'm too friggin' busy. 

Thankfully, the good people at Wordnik, in celebration of this frabjous day, are posting (and tweeting) a great word about words every hour, all day long. So I'm going to let them do the work for me. I suggest you click on the link and check them out.

The word that really caught my attention and pushed me toward redirecting you to Wordnik was hapax legomenon, which, according to Wordnik, is a word or form that appears only once in the recorded corpus of a given language. I'd give you an example, but if I were to use a hapax legomenon that I've heard here, it would cease to be a hapax legomenon, wouldn't it?