Right. A word can appear a given amount of times within a given corpus. It can be a hapax legomenon in Isaiah but appear 20 times in the rest of the Bible. Or, it can be a hapax legomenon in the whole Bible. If we're talking about two different words, we say that each is a hapax legomenon in a given text, and together there are two hapax legomena in that text.ducky wrote:I got confused a little bit.
hapax legomenon is kinda complicated and I'm sure I will write it wrong.
If a word happens only once in the Bible, can I call it a single word (or singular)?
Have you not studied Greek? This is the passive participle of λέγω lego. It means that a word is "said once." We should probably call them ἅπαξ γραφόμενα hapax graphomena, since they are technically WRITTEN once, not SPOKEN once. I don't get to make up the terminology, though.