Monologue

How to spell monologue

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce monologue

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does monologue mean?

1. nounA long speech delivered by one person, especially in a play, film, or performance.
2. verbTo deliver a long speech, often dominating a conversation by talking at length.

Monologue in a sentence

• noun

  The actor rehearsed the opening monologue until every line was perfect.

• verb

  He tends to monologue at dinner whenever the topic turns to politics.

• noun

  Her closing monologue on the talk show ran for nearly five minutes.

• verb

  She would often monologue about her travels while the others listened.

Where does monologue come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word is built from two Greek elements: monos, meaning 'single' or 'alone', and logos, meaning 'word', 'speech', or 'discourse'. The combination describes speech delivered by one person alone, in contrast to a dialogue, where logos is paired with dia, meaning 'across' or 'between'. English took the word in the seventeenth century from French monologue, which had been assembled on the Greek model, and it quickly settled into the theatre to name a long uninterrupted speech by a single character. The same logos root powers a huge family of English words, from 'logic' to the many fields ending in '-logy', and that shared ancestry is the clue to the spelling trap: the ending is the Greek '-logue', not a phonetic '-log'. Spelled out in full, the word literally means 'speaking alone'.

How the word is built

• mono- (single, alone)
• -logue (speech, discourse, from Greek logos: word)

British and American spelling

Monologue is the British spelling. American English spells it monolog.