monotone

UK/ˈmɒn.ə.təʊn/US/ˈmɑ.nə.toʊn/

nounC2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speech — monotonous sits at #8,935leans written

Other forms: monotones

A monotone is a voice that stays on one flat note, with no rise or fall. Every sentence ends where it started.

It is what makes a talk hard to follow, since English uses pitch to signal questions, emphasis and the end of an idea, and removing it removes the signposts. Speaking in a monotone is the fixed phrase. The word also works as an adjective. Its relative monotonous means tediously unvarying, which is what a monotone delivery produces in an audience.

Definitions of monotone

1nounmonotoneA way of speaking without variation in pitch.C2
“He read the whole notice in a flat monotone.”

Where it comes from

Monotone is one tone and no other. Greek monotonos meant steady or unwavering and Latin monotonus unvarying in tone; the boredom is English.

Latin
monotonus — unvarying in tone
English, today
monotone

Built from

μονότονος · Greek — steady”, “unwavering

From the post-Classical Latin monotonus (“unvarying in tone”) or its etymon the Ancient Greek - μονότονος (“steady”, “unwavering”); compare cognate adjectives, namely the French monotone, the German monoton, the Italian monotono, and the Spanish monótono, as well as the slightly earlier English noun monotony and adjective monotonical.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 10 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

monotone in the wild

In mathematics, a monotonic function (or monotone function) is a function between ordered sets that preserves or reverses the given order.
Monotonic function
In this article, we will refer to them as (monotone) Galois connections and antitone Galois connections.
Galois connection
In statistics, the monotone likelihood ratio property is a property of the ratio of two probability density functions (PDFs).
Monotone likelihood ratio
In the mathematical field of numerical analysis, monotone cubic interpolation is a variant of cubic interpolation that preserves monotonicity of the data set being interpolated.
Monotone cubic interpolation
Many problems in the calculus of variations can be expressed using operators that are pseudo-monotone, and pseudo-monotonicity in turn implies the existence of solutions to these problems.
Pseudo-monotone operator

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the monotonus family

monotonous

monotone — used too rare to measure · point at the bar for the others

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