Below we will talk about what monosyllables are, about the rules for distinguishing and using them, and about what you should pay attention to when using such words in writing. For a clearer understanding of the essence of the issue, we give examples of monosyllabic, bisyllabic, and some other groups of words.
What are monosyllables
Monosyllabic words are words consisting of one vowel and one phonetic syllable. The number of consonants can be any.
A phonetic syllable is called only one vowel in a word or a vowel in combination with one or more consonants, which are accompanied by one push of exhaled air when pronouncing.
It’s easiest to explain to a child what monosyllables are. Invite him to put his hand under his chin and say, for example, the following words: peace, cheese, mouse, sleep, March, court, sport, look, hedgehog, bread. When pronouncing each of these words, the chin touches the palm of the hand once. This is the defining feature of a monosyllabic word.
In other words, in such a word there is only one stressed syllable - the stress there is simply nowhere else to fall.
The use of monosyllables in writing is subject to the rule. Such words cannot be transferred from one line to another, because they cannot be divided into syllables.
Examples
Understand what monosyllables are based on the examples below. They can consist of one letter. These are the so-called "monophonic words." There are few of them, and the most popular among them, of course, is the personal pronoun "I". Other examples include the preposition "u", the conjunctive union "and", the opposing union "a" and interjection (a, o, e).
A relatively small number of monosyllables in Russian are represented by two letters. These are prepositions - on, for, in, to, from, by; nouns - as, silt, hedgehog, mind, mustache; the verb - eat, eat, eat; interjection - wow, oh, oh, ah, uv, fu, fi.
Quite often you can find words in which a vowel separates two consonants or stands in a different position. Here are examples of monosyllables of three letters: without, me, you, two, one hundred, cheese, rubbish, feast, steam, soap, sweet, col, rice, tour, boom, zga, etc.
However, linguists argue that the largest number of monosyllabic words are words consisting of more than three letters.
Here are examples of monosyllabic words consisting of four letters: growth, alertness, boxing, speed, dispute, friend, frozen, became, lay, smog, eye, raid, edge, moth, gat, darkness, wound, etc.
Do not confuse the number of letters in a word with the number of sounds: in the last four examples, the number of consonants is two (a soft sign indicates the softness of the previous letter and cannot be considered a sound). You will find similar examples below.
We also remind you that the letter "j" is considered a consonant sound, since it cannot form a syllable.
And here are monosyllables with five or more letters: away, guest, steppe, sleep, suddenly, reverse, really, look, filter, Kremlin, passion, stealing, etc.
Value
What does a monosyllabic word mean? The complexity of the word is independent of the grammatical, morphological features of the words, as well as their lexical meaning
Among the monosyllables you can find:
- Nouns in the nominative and indirect cases (cheese - noun. Pad .; force - plural. Genus. Pad. Darkness - darkness, darkness, etc.).
- Full and short forms of adjectives (evil - evil, rude, white, bald, dashing, etc.).
- Verbs (washed, chalk, sang, howled, stood up, was, hide, etc.).
- Adverbs (to the smack, to the heart, old, into the distance, evil, sorry, in vain, etc.).
- Different pronouns (you, you, he, we, I - to me; everything, myself; what, how, what; two, three, no, this).
- Particles (but, at least, well, tea (colloquial), albeit, after all), as well as the interjections and prepositions already mentioned above.
Two-syllable and other polysyllabic words
By the number of syllables, words can be, as the name implies, two-syllable, three-syllable, four-syllable, etc.
To clearly illustrate this point, and to clearly understand which words are called monosyllabic, you can use the same technique as described above: when pronouncing two-syllable words, the chin will push the palm twice - as many times as there are syllables in this word. In other words, two pushes of exhaled air will occur.
Two-syllable words contain two syllables: te-ba, me-nya, stu-pa, snake-i, la-don, friendship-ba, te-atr, just a hundred, came, shook, fused, forest, etc.
We give examples of three- and four-compound words: tro-pin-ka, shallow, kra-si-vy, just-so-yes, pri-ba-vit, u-ka-zat, shake-ki-vat, rain-do-it-yourself, star-rush-ka, not-so-yes, me-se-zon-e, dance-so-wa-i, ku-ka-re-kat, for-for-mi- nat and others
Words formed using a suffix or prefix, including those that are written with a hyphen, are considered as a whole: somehow (a two-syllable word), let's go (a three-syllable), exactly (a two-syllable), well (two-part).
Actually complex words
Please note that in the Russian language there are so-called "compound words" - this is a group of words that has two or more roots. Most often, these roots are connected in one word using connecting vowels (the so-called "interfixes") or they are written with a hyphen.
In both cases, they should be considered as whole formations, regardless of the number of roots with which they were formed.
Here are examples of such words: three hundred (two-word, four consonants), airplane (three-word, four consonants), somehow (three-word, three consonants), wardrobe (three-word, five consonants), etc.