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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
monotonous
adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ NOUN
regularity
▪ The ineffable Louis Stanley, operating from his suite in the Dorchester, launched new but already outmoded cars with monotonous regularity.
▪ Indeed, he was a sickly child, succumbing with monotonous regularity to ear and throat infections.
▪ This magnet for unwanted paper will fill up and overflow with monotonous regularity and should be abolished.
▪ He was still hitting greens with monotonous regularity, but on the putting surface his touch had deserted him.
▪ Learners like hand-outs, but they should not be used with monotonous regularity to echo everything the teacher says.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ a monotonous voice
▪ Life on the farm was slow and monotonous.
▪ My job is monotonous, but at least I'm working.
▪ The teacher's low monotonous voice almost put me to sleep.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ For man and beast, it was slow, monotonous work.
▪ Her life is a monotonous routine.
▪ In distant prospect I look forward to them greatly, as a break from the monotonous, lonely routine of writing.
▪ It is backbreaking, monotonous and requires skill.
▪ Moods and attitudes were no longer volatile but fixed, slightly dogmatic, monotonous.
▪ Some are assigned different tasks, partly to prevent the work from becoming monotonous.
▪ The monotonous sound of the train was an invitation to float, the engine emitting smooth, continuous snorts and sneezes.
▪ The rhythmic, monotonous noise of their chewing was soothing to Nails.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Monotonous

Monotonous \Mo*not"o*nous\, a. [Gr. ?; mo`nos alone, single + ? tone. See Tone.] Uttered in one unvarying tone; continued with dull uniformity; characterized by monotony; without change or variety; wearisome. -- Mo*not"o*nous*ly, adv. -- Mo*not"o*nous*ness, n.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
monotonous

1750, of sound, from Greek monotonos "of one tone" (see monotony). Transferred and figurative use, "lacking in variety, uninteresting," is from 1783. Related: Monotonously.

Wiktionary
monotonous

a. 1 having an unvarying tone or pitch 2 tedious, repetitious or lacking in variety

WordNet
monotonous
  1. adj. sounded or spoken in a tone unvarying in pitch; "the owl's faint monotonous hooting" [syn: monotone, monotonic]

  2. tediously repetitious or lacking in variety; "a humdrum existence; all work and no play"; "nothing is so monotonous as the sea" [syn: humdrum]

Wikipedia
Monotonous (song)

"Monotonous" is a popular song written by June Carroll and Arthur Siegel for Leonard Sillman's Broadway revue New Faces of 1952. The song was written based on the experiences of its singer Eartha Kitt. It was performed, at the insistence of Kitt, on three chaise longues (Kitt tried originally for six and was given three in compromise), crawling cat-like from one to the other, demonstrating her flexibility and her dance training from the Katherine Dunham Company. The song also includes references to many well-known people of the 1950s. People referenced in the song include:

  • Montgomery Clift
  • Jacques Fath (the song states that he made a new style for Eartha Kitt, based on when she opened the club Le Perroquet, and Fath provided her with a completely new wardrobe as he admired her body).
  • Johnnie Ray
  • Harry S. Truman
  • T. S. Eliot
  • Farouk of Egypt
  • Sherman Billingsley
  • Chiang Kai-Shek
  • Gayelord Hauser
  • Dwight David Eisenhower, referred to as "Ike"

Category:1952 songs

Usage examples of "monotonous".

An automaton is someone who acts in a routine or monotonous manner and lacks active intellect.

It was, indeed, a singularly dull, monotonous voice which, arising from the upper end of the room, dragged itself on towards the middle, and expired with a sighing sound before it reached the end.

After a while she was talking in the monotonous logorrhea of emotional release.

The song ov the muskeeto iz monotonous to sum folks, but in me it stirs up the memorys ov other days.

We lunched under the wide-spreading branches of these gnarled and twisted trees, which reminded us of the patriarchal olives in the Garden of Gethsemane, and then, ascending over the monotonous paramo, we stood at the elevation of 15,000 feet on the narrow summit of the Guamani ridge.

Literature can never conform to the dictates of pure euphony, while grammar, which has been shaped not in the interests of prosody, but for the service of thought, bars the way with its clumsy inalterable polysyllables and the monotonous sing-song of its inflexions.

From the hollow roof of the barn and from the thick velvet-like padding of dust over the ground outside, and from among the leaves of the few nearby trees and plants there came a vast, monotonous murmur that seemed to issue from all quarters of the horizon at once, a prolonged and subdued rustling sound, steady, even, persistent.

The song of a prothonotary warbler is notoriously monotonous, as I am the first to admit.

Nor can we reasonably blame the average money-getting public for their impatience with the monotonous virulence of men who are constantly reviling them for not living communistically, and who after all, are not doing it themselves.

His police record soon became a sorrily monotonous rollcall of decked grannies.

They, of course, had not yet arrived at the idea that God is a personal Spirit whose nature is revealed in the constitutive characteristics of the human soul, and who carries on his works from eternity to eternity without monotonous repetition or wearisome stagnancy, but with perpetual variety in never ceasingmotion.

His mind seemed to have grown old, steeped in monotonous thoughts of wolf and track.

The life in this camp is most monotonous and the cuisine is worse, which is a terrible disappointment to me as I am rather fond ol German cooking, and particularly adore the apple strudel of this race, and the chow they give us makes me more violently anti-Nazi than ever and also gives me indigestion.

He was in a mood to cherish warmly the funny, cold little culture that the street represented, the narrow unamiable culture with its taboos against mentioned reality, its elaborate suppression of sex, its insistence on a stoical ability to withstand a monotonous routine of business or drudgery -- and in the midst, performing the necessary rituals to keep dead ideas alive, like a college of witch-doctors in their stern stone tents, powerful, property-owning Hempnell.

But the drinking water had been foul and the diet of salt meat and bread unhealthily monotonous, and all the convicts had been violently ill with the type of sickness that was called sometimes hospital fever and sometimes jail fever.