Hapax Legomena: Why Words That Appear Only Once in Scripture Deserve Your Attention

The term "hapax legomenon" comes from the Greek for "said once." In textual scholarship, it refers to a word that appears only a single time in a given corpus. The Bible contains hundreds of hapax legomena in both Hebrew and Greek, and the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price have their own unique vocabulary as well. These one-time words are fascinating because they sit at the edge of our understanding -- a word used only once gives translators very little context to work with, and the resulting English rendering may be a best guess rather than a certainty.

In the Hebrew Old Testament, one well-known hapax legomenon is "tachash" in Exodus 25:5, where God commands that the tabernacle be covered with "tachash" skins. The King James Version translates this as "badgers' skins," but the word appears nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible, so scholars have proposed alternatives including dolphin, dugong, and fine leather. The point is not that the KJV is wrong -- it is that a single occurrence gives us very limited data, and knowing that a word is a hapax legomenon alerts you to hold the translation loosely and consider alternatives.

In the Book of Mormon, hapax legomena take on additional significance for questions of authorship and composition. If the Book of Mormon were dictated by a single mind drawing on a limited vocabulary, you would expect a relatively uniform distribution of word usage. Instead, different books within the Book of Mormon contain distinct sets of unique words, consistent with multiple underlying authors. The word "irreantum" in 1 Nephi 17:5, for instance, appears nowhere else in scripture and is presented as a non-English term meaning "many waters" -- exactly what you would expect from a text that claims to preserve non-English source material.

The Hapax Legomena tool on Scripture Deep identifies every word that appears only once across the standard works and lets you filter by volume, book, and language. For each word, the tool shows the verse where it appears, the surrounding context, and notes on translation uncertainty where applicable. It is a tool for the curious reader -- the kind of person who notices an unusual word in a verse and wants to know whether it appears anywhere else. More often than not, the answer is no, and that fact itself becomes a doorway into deeper study.