Category talk:English hapax legomena

RFV discussion: July–August 2021
hapax legomenon (entry, appendix, category) means it was only used once. But WT:CFI + WT:WDL require three usages for English terms. --Macopre (talk) 13:26, 19 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep the ones from Shakespeare, the others should go through the regular RFV process.--Tibidibi (talk) 13:52, 19 July 2021 (UTC)
 * This is WT:RFVE where 3 usages are needed and not WT:RFDE on which is voted. WT:CFI has no exception for Shakespeare, and also not for KJV or any other English author, also not for any Early New English author. --Macopre (talk) 14:46, 19 July 2021 (UTC)
 * I personally don't believe that anything from Shakespeare could be a bona fide hapax legomena and indeed, every word in the category has cites not from Shakespeare excepting manticratic (T.E. Lawrence) and sessa; put the cites on the Citations page for anything deleted so someone can get back to this when they are assembling three cites in the future. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 15:48, 19 July 2021 (UTC)
 * If there are three independent usages, then the terms aren't hapax legomena and could simply be removed from the category. --Macopre (talk) 19:51, 19 July 2021 (UTC)
 * The entries admit they are hapaxes and inform the reader about their rarity. So what Macapre suggests the editors should have lied so he could not have found them to make a request about them. Thus while I don’t know what Geographyinitiative means with bona fides, we have to conclude that Macopre acts mala fide. Also already had more quotes, whereby he again shows that he does not esteem the informational content of this dictionary. It was a hapax until about 1900 perhaps then artificially revived or something from Shakespeare dictionaries or similar. In any case it needed to be kept as a translation target even if hapax, as the listed synonyms are SOP (which is not an excuse to delete them). Fay Freak (talk) 20:44, 19 July 2021 (UTC)
 * I guessed from context that would appear to be borrowed from the second-person singular imperative of either  or, and this source lists Latin and Italian but also Spanish and French as possible etyma, but is not satisfied enough to conclude. The entry also mentions "various spellings" but fails to list any others, but the source adds "sus", "ses, ses", "Sa, sa", "Cà, cà" (in a French phrase), and even "Sa, sa, sa". If these are related, we would have to assume some expressive reanalysis. But more importantly, in that case it would not be a hapax. Unfortunately it seems currently impossible to prove they are one and the same expression, but such uncertainty can be explained as a note on the page. — 69.120.64.15 21:07, 19 July 2021 (UTC)
 * In olden times CFI allowed inclusion based on a single use by a very important author. That changed a few years ago.  Vox Sciurorum (talk) 17:09, 20 July 2021 (UTC)

We now have three cites for everything except manticratic and sessa. Kiwima (talk) 00:16, 20 July 2021 (UTC)


 * We had a similar discussion a while ago about the "nonce" label, following the vote Vox mentions. We still have Category:English nonce terms because IIRC it was felt to still make sense to speak of repeatedly-coined nonces as nonces. I think it makes less sense to speak of repeatedly-used words as hapax legomena, or to think of the category as being for "hapax legomena in a certain author", because even common words can be hapax legomena in certain authors. I'm inclined to agree with OP that the category doesn't make sense for English; to the extent its contents meet CFI, they'd be better categorized as rare and/or nonces, or (less desirably, IMO) the category could be made an umbrella for subcategories like "hapax legomena in Shakespeare" etc. - -sche (discuss) 17:52, 20 July 2021 (UTC)

RFV-resolved and  fail. Everything else has been cited. Kiwima (talk) 01:12, 20 August 2021 (UTC)

RFD discussion: August–November 2023
Any entry in this category blatantly violates CFI. Ioaxxere (talk) 17:40, 13 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Both words are at RFV now. The category's going to be empty when those RFVs are resolved. This, that and the other (talk) 00:55, 14 August 2023 (UTC)


 * I wonder if it'd be a good idea to automate the text generation for the hapax legomena categories for WDLs so that it says they should in general be empty/unused? —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 19:47, 16 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @Al-Muqanna Yes, this is possible. In fact I added not so long ago (for RichardW57) a way for categories to be customized per language (although for this it might make sense to handle it centrally since the displayed text will be the same for all WDL's). This means we'll need to move the list of WDL's from WT:WDL to Lua. Benwing2 (talk) 21:00, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

The entries failed RFV, so this can now be RFD-deleted. This, that and the other (talk) 04:31, 23 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Would it be somewhat useful to have Appendices (by language) for such terms? Some are well-known, eg, Shakespearean and Joycean ones with conjectures and research into possible meaning. There could be links to the citations namespace page and to the talk page therefrom. I think the advantage over mere inclusion of RfV and RfD discussions on principal-namespace talk pages would be ease of scanning the terms for alternate forms etc. DCDuring (talk) 14:49, 25 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Like "Appendix:English dictionary-only terms"? I'd have no objection to this. — Sgconlaw (talk) 16:20, 25 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Like that, but augmented with a link to the entry page, citations page, talk page (which should have any RfD and RfV discussions), etc. for the term: eg:, , , , Special:WhatLinksHere&target=buse DCDuring (talk) 17:01, 25 November 2023 (UTC)