1. a vowel sound that remains constant in quality throughout its duration
Usage: linguistics

Examples

• The vowel sound in ‘cat’ is a monophthong.
• English has several monophthongs, including the sounds in ‘bit’ and ‘but’.
• Unlike diphthongs, monophthongs do not glide from one vowel quality to another.
• The teacher explained that monophthongs are single, unchanging vowel sounds.
• In phonetics class, we learned to distinguish monophthongs from complex vowel sounds.
• The word ‘see’ contains a monophthong, while ‘say’ contains a diphthong.