single word requests - An event that occurs only once



What do you call an event that occurs only once in its environment?


For instance, birth and death are two events that occur only once in the lifetime of a living thing.


I am looking for a word or phrase that would be synonymous to "non-repeating".



Answer



Consider the following:



One-time, one-off, one-shot, singleton, nonce.



Unique may serve, as mentioned in a comment below, and some other perhaps-less-suitable words are suggested in Antonym of "recurrent" [closed], including



isolated, seldom, infrequent, non-periodic.



The macmillandictionary.com “happening only once” entry mentions several of the words listed above, as well as just this once, unrepeatable and in/at one fell swoop. Macmillan gives two senses of the fell swoop phrase: 1, Happening or done quickly, suddenly or immediately ... at once, straight away; 2, Happening only once: once, isolated, unrepeatable. But in several other sources (1a,1b,2,3) that second sense isn't listed.


Prefixes hapl-, haplo- are “word-forming element[s] meaning "simple, single; simply, once”. As a related example, hapax legomenon means “"word occurring only once," Greek, literally "once said," from hapax "once only" + legomenon...”. Wikipedia's hapax legomenon article defines the term more precisely.


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