Monotheism
noun ·Uncommon ·College level
Definitions
- 1 Belief in the One True God, defined by More as personal, immaterial and trinitarian. countable, obsolete, uncountable
- 2 belief in a single God wordnet
- 3 The belief in a single deity (one god or goddess); especially within an organized religion. countable, uncountable
- 4 The belief that God is one person (Judaism, Unitarian Christianity, Islam), not three persons (Trinitarian Christianity, Hinduism) countable, uncountable
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"Throughout their career the Sixth Men had often been fascinated by the idea of flight. The bird was again and again their most sacred symbol. Their monotheism was apt to be worship not of a god-man, but of a godbird, conceived now as the divine sea-eagle, winged with power, now as the giant swift, winged with mercy, now as a disembodied spirit of air, and once as the bird-god that became man to endow the human race with flight, physical and spiritual."
Etymology
A learned 17th-century coinage, mono- + theism, from (μονός (monós, “one”)) and (θεός (theós, “god, deity”) + -ισμός (-ismós)) The term parallels the earlier polytheism, atheism (the simplex theism being slightly later). The term was coined by Henry More, ca. 1660, in explicit juxtaposition with both atheism and polytheism. It was redefined through etymological fallacy by Daniel Webster ca. 1828.
Related phrases
More for "monotheism"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.