The English Oracle

Is there a term for words that have a single meaning or are only used in a single context?

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Chapters
00:00 Is There A Term For Words That Have A Single Meaning Or Are Only Used In A Single Context?
00:56 Accepted Answer Score 30
01:19 Answer 2 Score 13
01:33 Answer 3 Score 6
01:48 Answer 4 Score 12
02:24 Thank you

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Full question
https://english.stackexchange.com/questi...

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Tags
#singlewordrequests #terminology #noncewords #uniquity #cranberrymorphemes

#avk47



ACCEPTED ANSWER

Score 30


It's a "stormy petrel." The idea, as described on the linked page, is that (for example) you never (or, at least, rarely) find a petrel that's not stormy. Similarly, "all shrift is short," and lots of other examples. One of the ones there is in fact "every skirl is of bagpipes."




ANSWER 2

Score 13


Closely related are fossil words, which have no meaning outside of a certain set phrase. "Bated" survives only in "bated breath", for example.




ANSWER 3

Score 12


There are several terms for closely related concepts:

  • A nonce word is a word that somebody made up for a localized purpose. Apart from fossilized words, those nonce words that caught on are probably the major part of this group.

  • A cranberry morpheme is a morpheme that has no meaning on its own, and exists only as part of one or a small number of words. (It's named after the "cran" of "cranberry".) A fossil word is similarly a word that is used only in a small number of phrases (but whose state is specifically due to the original meaning's obsolescence).

  • A hapax legomenon (of a particular corpus) is a word that appears exactly once.




ANSWER 4

Score 6


There is no clear word or term that conveys words that have a single meaning or are only used in a single context. The nearest match is the word unequivocal:

having only one possible meaning or interpretation.