Hapax Neologism

In order to mean something by its own, a “unit” should be recognized by the people you are communicating with ; recognition being the notion that was lacking in our introductory definitions. This recognition can be academic, informal, limited to one person or broadly accepted among the population, without any of these parameters sharing systematic cause-effect relationship. To expose the importance of recognition when we discuss the meaning of words, I will use the notion of neologism, thanks to an article from Guilbert Louis entitled Théorie du néologisme.

My first focus will be about words that are called hapax, whose definition is : “a word or form that occurs only once in the recorded corpus of a given language” . One famous example in French is “abracadabrantesque” , which was to be found only once in a poem from Rimbaud until Jacques Chirac re-used it to qualify accusations aimed at him during an interview in 2000, giving it exposition and fame. Hapaxes are a specific kind of neologism, as they are not answering any specific need from the community or gap in the

A word that is either rejected or not added yet in the official dictionaries does not lose its meaning whatsoever. This is the true nature of a neologism: a word with a meaning whose intention is to enrich the communication with other people of the community . However, if its use become regular enough, it might finally be officially be added into dictionaries and join other “standard” words in the language. Neologisms, contrary to what we called hapaxes, answer to a need, or fill a gap in the language, and create a whole sign to identify a new concept or object. What is really important to notice is that they are words as long as they are used by the community, because if a neologism has no practical use, it will eventually die off