English

Noun

mononymy ‎(uncountable)

1. Standardization of terms so that each entity has only one name.
   • 1993, Richard Alan Strehlow & ‎Sue Ellen Wright, Standardizing Terminology for Better Communication, ISBN 0803114931:

     ISO 704 and ISO 1087 prescribe mononymy as highly desirable for standardized terminologies, but as experience shows, individuals in developing disciplines (having unsettled terminology) are rarely able to agree on mononyms.

   • 1997, Knowledge Organization - Volumes 24-25, page 10:

     As for mononymy, in the context of standardization, the notion that a concept ought to have only one designation seemed both reasonable and desirable.

   • 2006, Pius ten Hacken, Terminology, Computing and Translation, ISBN 3823361376, page 29:

     The emphasis here is on monosemy (one meaning per term) and one term per concept (which is commonly called mononymy, although this term is avoided in the standard, perhaps because it is less transparent).

   • 2007, Bassey Antia, Indeterminacy in Terminology and LSP, ISBN 9027292418:

     What I am calling systematic gazetteers are primarily digital in form and address this lack of mononymy by providing a mix of disambiguating information in complex gazetteer records.

2. The use of one-word names.
   • 1960, Carl John Drake, Collected papers - Volume 3, page 7:

     This new system, mononymy, would classify animals by means of a one-word taxon representing both genus and species in lieu of the binary system of two words, one for genus and the other for species.

   • 1940 May, Earl Edward Sherff, “The concept of the genus: IV. The delimitations of genera from the conservative point of view”, in Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club, volume 67:

     Bailey even states that "we should have gained much in simplicity of literature, in clarity and in popular usage, if we had had a mononymy or other arrangement instead of a taxonomic dionymy."