legomena

Legomena is a term used in linguistics to refer to words that occur with a specified minimum frequency within a text or corpus. In common usage, legomena are all words that appear more than once in a given text, while hapax legomenon denotes a word that occurs only once. The study of legomena is part of frequency analysis and lexical richness assessment, contrasting the counts of repeated words with hapax legomena to reveal patterns of variation and style.

Etymology: The word legomena comes from the Greek legomenon, meaning "something said," from legō 'to say.' The plural is legomena. The full term hapax legomenon combines hapax "once" with legomenon.

Types: Within a text, repeated words can be classified by exact frequency. Dis legomenon is a word that occurs exactly twice. Tris legomenon refers to exactly three occurrences. Polylegomenon (or polylegonomenon) denotes four or more occurrences. The terms are more common in classical studies and corpus linguistics than in everyday usage.

Applications and limitations: Legomena analysis helps assess lexical diversity, authorship signals, and stylistic traits in ancient texts and modern corpora. However, results depend on text length, genre, morphology, and language; inflected forms, lemmatization choices, and sampling can affect counts. The concept complements hapax analysis by situating recurring vocabulary within the text's frequency distribution.