1. Plural of hapax; words or forms that occur only once in a text, corpus, or language.
Usage: linguistics; technical term used in corpus linguistics and textual analysis

Examples

• The researcher identified several hapaxes in the ancient manuscript that appeared nowhere else in the corpus.
• Hapaxes can make it difficult to determine the meaning of rare words in historical texts.
• Linguists often exclude hapaxes from frequency analyses because they occur too infrequently to be statistically meaningful.
• The presence of many hapaxes in a text may indicate specialized vocabulary or a unique authorial style.
• When studying word frequency, hapaxes are typically filtered out to focus on more common patterns.