Is there a word for "one word", like monosyllabic means "one syllable"?

December 12, 2013 3:13 PM

Is there a word for "one word", like monosyllabic means "one syllable"?
posted by mikeand1 to Writing & Language (10 answers total)

Monoverbal.
posted by Tanizaki at 3:29 PM on December 12, 2013

Response by poster: It doesn't have to be a colloquial word, but it has to be a "real word", meaning I can find it in a dictionary of the English language.

I don't see either monoverbal or monolexical in the OED, for example.
posted by mikeand1 at 3:40 PM on December 12, 2013

I don't think there is one. At least, like spitbull said, there is not one that linguists use. For example, young children who only speak in one-word utterances are said to... well, speak in one-word utterances. If it helps, "monomorphemic" means made up of one morpheme, or meaningful unit (root, affix, etc). That is a common linguistic term.
posted by karbonokapi at 3:43 PM on December 12, 2013

"Holophrastic" refers to the way toddlers use one-word "sentences" for everything.
posted by doop at 3:54 PM on December 12, 2013 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: I did google it. As nearly as I can tell, linguists don't actually speak English. :)
posted by mikeand1 at 6:44 PM on December 12, 2013 [4 favorites]

I've seen both "monolexemic" and "monolexical" in linguistics contexts.
posted by redfoxtail at 7:09 PM on December 12, 2013

Terse.
posted by flabdablet at 8:02 PM on December 12, 2013 [1 favorite]

Or if what you're actually after is a word for "one word" in the way that "monosyllabic" means "one syllable": eschew sesquipedalian grandiloquence altogether and hyphenate "one-word".
posted by flabdablet at 8:44 PM on December 12, 2013 [4 favorites]

I go along with flabdablet. Just as "monosyllable" has many syllables but means "one syllable," a (phrase) that would mean one word would have many words. The symmetry of language.
posted by mbarryf at 6:01 AM on December 13, 2013

May not be what you are looking for--but in biblical studies (and evidently computer science as well), a word that appears only once within a textual corpus is called a hapax legomenon, or "hapax" for short.
posted by apartment dweller at 6:05 AM on December 13, 2013 [1 favorite]