Word.ws English Dictionary

unary

/ˈjuːnəɹi/

unary adjective: consisting of or involving a single element or component.

Adjective

unary (not comparable)

  1. Consisting of or involving a single element or component.
    • 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.1995, Becky McLaughlin, “Perverse Pleasure and Fetishized Text: The Deathly Erotics of Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’”, in Style, volume 29, number 3, →JSTOR, page 219
  2. Of an operation, function, procedure, or logic gate, taking exactly one operand, argument, parameter, or input; having domain of dimension 1.
    • Negation is a unary operation.
    • Zadeh’s claim is that if the meaning of an expression (X) can be modeling by a fuzzy membership function variable, then the meaning of an expression such as “very X” is simply a membership function over the same variable determined by applying a unary operator to the membership function for X.1990, Dominic A. Clark, “Verbal uncertainty expressions: A critical review of two decades of research”, in Current Psychology, volume 9, number 3, →DOI, page 229

Noun

unary (countable and uncountable, plural unaries)

  1. The unary, or bijective base-1, numeral system.
  2. Unary coding, an entropy encoding for natural numbers.

unary meaning in Malay and Persian

unary in Malay

consisting of or involving a single element or component
sesatu
mathematics, programming: of a function, to take one argument
sesatu

unary in Persian

consisting of or involving a single element or component
یگانی yegâni

Forms of unary

pluralunaries

Origin of unary

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

Words formed from unary

Phrases with unary

Questions about unary

What does unary mean?
Unary means consisting of or involving a single element or component.
What is unary in Malay?
Unary in Malay is sesatu. See Unary meaning in Malay.
What part of speech is unary?
Unary can be an adjective or a noun.
How do you pronounce unary?
Unary is pronounced /ˈjuːnəɹi/.

Words near unary in the dictionary

  1. unartificially
  2. unartistic
  3. unartistical
  4. unartistically
  5. unartistlike
  6. unary
  7. unary operation
  8. unary operations
  9. unary operator
  10. unary operators
  11. UNAs

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: unary (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.

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