monosyllabic Hear it!

monosyllabic Definition

mono·syl·labic (män′ō si labik, män′ə-)

adjective

  1. having only one syllable a monosyllabic word
  2. consisting of monosyllables
  3. using, or speaking in, monosyllables, often so as to seem terse or uncommunicative

Etymology: ML monosyllabicus

Related Forms:

monosyllabic Usage Examples

Modifies a noun

  • word: Learning these 64 correspondences enables children to read approximately 90 % of the monosyllabic words in all four sets of texts.
  • reply: He liked to sit long hours over his meals, grunting monosyllabic replies, staring out at the troops that marched below the window.
  • answer: Children often responded with monosyllabic answers or gestures rather than appropriate language.
  • language: They have no written language, but speak a monosyllabic language, and have a Sign and Gesture Language.
  • verb: In contrast, her morphological construction-based theory simply requires the daughter to appear twice for monosyllabic verbs.
  • foot: The present document just includes examples from groups 3 and 4, which as you'll see both have a monosyllabic nuclear foot.

Modifying Another Word

  • almost: Peter Dinklage's performance is particularly good, particularly since his dialog is almost monosyllabic for much of the film.
  • virtually: Certainly, in media interviews the normally voluble economics graduate was virtually monosyllabic, his face resembling an Easter Island statue.
  • usually: The author really tries to dig beneath the surface of the usually monosyllabic Coen Brothers and is pretty successful.
monosyllabic Quotes

I hope I've done nothing so monosyllabic as to cheat. A spade is never so merelya spade as the word Spade would imply.

—Fry, C(harles) B(urgess)