Art & MusicGreek → English
Monotone
/ˈmɑnətoʊn/noun
Speech or sound held at one unchanging pitch.
The Greek roots
μόνος
mónos
single, alone
τόνος
tónos
pitch, tension
Literally: “single tone”
The story of the word
τόνος is a stretching, from τείνω, to stretch, so pitch in Greek is literally how tight the string is. μονότονος described a voice that never moved off one note, and English took the word in the seventeenth century before widening it to any grinding sameness. Mathematics kept the strict sense: a monotonic function only ever goes one way, and the hypotenuse is from the same τείνω, the side stretching under the right angle.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 17th century
Same family
tonemonotonousmonologuehypotenuse
In a sentence
He read the safety announcement in a monotone that made everyone stop listening by the second line.