Word.ws English Dictionary

one-note

one-note adjective: having only one opinion, outlook, tone, etc., especially as expressed repetitively; without variety or range.

Adjective

one-note (not comparable)

  1. (idiomatic) Having only one opinion, outlook, tone, etc., especially as expressed repetitively; without variety or range.
    • But Pope Brock plays him in such a one-note key of gulping and spitting and snickering cynicism that the spectacle becomes numbing.1971 March 13, Michael Sragow, “Theatre: Look Back in Anger Tonight at the Loeb Ex”, in Harvard Crimson, retrieved 25 Jul 2009
    • The footnotes that attend Ambrose Bierce in the U.S. literary canon roughly place him as a minor writer of grotesque supernatural tales and trenchant war stories, a misanthrope, curmudgeon, a purveyor of stringing sarcasms, a one-note wit.1992, Jane Creighton, “Bierce, Fuentes, and the Critique of Reading”, in South Central Review, volume 9, number 2, page 66

one-note meaning in Bengali

one-note in Bengali

শুধুমাত্র একটি মতামত, দৃষ্টিভঙ্গি, সুর ইত্যাদি থাকা, বৈচিত্র্য, ব্যাপ্তি ছাড়া

Examples of one-note in a sentence

  • This sort of one-note response is precisely the problem facing politically engaged academics in the U.S. at the moment.2005, Anahid Kassabian, “Academic Frostbite (A Cautionary Tale)”, in Women's Studies Quarterly, volume 33, number 3/4, page 403:
  • The movie is one long snigger. […] It might be one-note, but at least it's in the key of funny.2009 June 18, Mary Pols, “Year One: Jokes from the Stone Age”, in Time, archived from the original on 15 Feb 2013:
  • Moreover, Drive Angry offers evidence that Cage hasn't recently been one-note in his performances so much as in his choice of schlocky material.2011 June 3, Benjamin Mercer, “On ‘Drive Angry,’ the Schlocky Role Nicolas Cage Was Born to Play”, in The Atlantic:

Synonyms of one-note

Origin of one-note

An allusion to the monotony of a single musical note played or sung repeatedly.

Phrases with one-note

Questions about one-note

What does one-note mean?
One-note means having only one opinion, outlook, tone, etc., especially as expressed repetitively; without variety or range.
What is one-note in Bengali?
One-note in Bengali is শুধুমাত্র একটি মতামত, দৃষ্টিভঙ্গি, সুর ইত্যাদি থাকা. See One-note meaning in Bengali.
How do you use one-note in a sentence?
This sort of one-note response is precisely the problem facing politically engaged academics in the U.S. at the moment.
What part of speech is one-note?
One-note is an adjective.

Words near one-note in the dictionary

  1. one-night stand
  2. one-night stands
  3. one-nighter
  4. one-nighters
  5. one-ninth
  6. one-note
  7. one-of
  8. one-of-a-kind
  9. one-of-a-kinds
  10. one-off
  11. one-offs

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: one-note (page history and authors); one-note (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-one-note.ogg.

Cite this entry: “one-note.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/one-note. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.