Unary

//ˈjuːnəɹi// adj, noun

adj, noun ·Uncommon ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The unary, or bijective base-1, numeral system. countable, uncountable
  2. 2
    the bijective base-1 numeral system: in order to represent a number N, an arbitrarily chosen symbol representing 1 is repeated N times. wordnet
  3. 3
    Unary coding, an entropy encoding for natural numbers. countable, uncountable
Adjective
  1. 1
    Consisting of or involving a single element or component. not-comparable

    "Her work is a renunciation of the old narrative, a throwing away of the cotton reel, an enunciation of the unary signifier, fort, that is meaningless in itself."

  2. 2
    Of an operation, function, procedure, or logic gate, taking exactly one operand, argument, parameter, or input; having domain of dimension 1. not-comparable

    "Negation is a unary operation."

Adjective
  1. 1
    consisting of or involving a single element or component wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
binarysingleternaryunary numeral system

Example

More examples

"In the C and C++ programming languages, the unary operators take only one argument."

Etymology

From Latin ūnus (“one”) + -ary, on the pattern of binary, ternary, etc.

Related phrases

unary operationunary operatorlogic gatenatural numberunary codingunary numeral system

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.