See one-note in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
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"etymology_text": "An allusion to the monotony of a single musical note played or sung repeatedly.",
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"ref": "1971 March 13, Michael Sragow, “Theatre: Look Back in Anger Tonight at the Loeb Ex”, in Harvard Crimson, retrieved 25 Jul 2009:",
"text": "But Pope Brock plays him in such a one-note key of gulping and spitting and snickering cynicism that the spectacle becomes numbing.",
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"ref": "1992, Jane Creighton, “Bierce, Fuentes, and the Critique of Reading”, in South Central Review, volume 9, number 2, page 66:",
"text": "The footnotes that attend Ambrose Bierce in the U.S. literary canon roughly place him as a minor writer of grotesque supernatural tales and trenchant war stories, a misanthrope, curmudgeon, a purveyor of stringing sarcasms, a one-note wit.",
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"ref": "2005, Anahid Kassabian, “Academic Frostbite (A Cautionary Tale)”, in Women's Studies Quarterly, volume 33, number 3/4, page 403:",
"text": "To his mind, there was only one right and true position on the question. This sort of one-note response is precisely the problem facing politically engaged academics in the U.S. at the moment.",
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"ref": "2009 June 18, Mary Pols, “Year One: Jokes from the Stone Age”, in Time, archived from the original on 15 Feb 2013:",
"text": "The movie is one long snigger. […] It might be one-note, but at least it's in the key of funny.",
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"ref": "2011 June 3, Benjamin Mercer, “On ‘Drive Angry,’ the Schlocky Role Nicolas Cage Was Born to Play”, in The Atlantic:",
"text": "Moreover, Drive Angry offers evidence that Cage hasn't recently been one-note in his performances so much as in his choice of schlocky material.",
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"ref": "2026 September 15, Stuart Heritage, “No Big Deal review – is this how AI ends humanity … with a sitcom so bad it bores you to death?”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:",
"text": "This is not a funny show. It’s one-note and bawdy, and none of the jokes land. It seems as though, by rushing straight to AI, Dickinson has bypassed the development process that actually makes something good.",
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"glosses": [
"Having only one opinion, outlook, tone, etc., especially as expressed repetitively; without variety or range."
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"id": "en-one-note-en-adj-QvC5QjGW",
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"(idiomatic) Having only one opinion, outlook, tone, etc., especially as expressed repetitively; without variety or range."
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"related": [
{
"word": "Johnny-one-note"
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],
"synonyms": [
{
"word": "invariant"
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{
"word": "monotonal"
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{
"word": "monotonous"
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"translations": [
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"code": "de",
"lang": "German",
"lang_code": "de",
"sense": "Translations",
"word": "eintönig"
}
]
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"sounds": [
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"audio": "En-au-one-note.ogg",
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"word": "one-note"
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],
"etymology_text": "An allusion to the monotony of a single musical note played or sung repeatedly.",
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"ref": "1971 March 13, Michael Sragow, “Theatre: Look Back in Anger Tonight at the Loeb Ex”, in Harvard Crimson, retrieved 25 Jul 2009:",
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226,
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"text": "The footnotes that attend Ambrose Bierce in the U.S. literary canon roughly place him as a minor writer of grotesque supernatural tales and trenchant war stories, a misanthrope, curmudgeon, a purveyor of stringing sarcasms, a one-note wit.",
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"text": "To his mind, there was only one right and true position on the question. This sort of one-note response is precisely the problem facing politically engaged academics in the U.S. at the moment.",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
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[
47,
55
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"ref": "2009 June 18, Mary Pols, “Year One: Jokes from the Stone Age”, in Time, archived from the original on 15 Feb 2013:",
"text": "The movie is one long snigger. […] It might be one-note, but at least it's in the key of funny.",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"bold_text_offsets": [
[
69,
77
]
],
"ref": "2011 June 3, Benjamin Mercer, “On ‘Drive Angry,’ the Schlocky Role Nicolas Cage Was Born to Play”, in The Atlantic:",
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"type": "quotation"
},
{
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[
31,
39
]
],
"ref": "2026 September 15, Stuart Heritage, “No Big Deal review – is this how AI ends humanity … with a sitcom so bad it bores you to death?”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:",
"text": "This is not a funny show. It’s one-note and bawdy, and none of the jokes land. It seems as though, by rushing straight to AI, Dickinson has bypassed the development process that actually makes something good.",
"type": "quotation"
}
],
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"Having only one opinion, outlook, tone, etc., especially as expressed repetitively; without variety or range."
],
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"(idiomatic) Having only one opinion, outlook, tone, etc., especially as expressed repetitively; without variety or range."
],
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{
"word": "invariant"
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{
"word": "monotonal"
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{
"word": "monotonous"
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"code": "de",
"lang": "German",
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"sense": "Translations",
"word": "eintönig"
}
],
"word": "one-note"
}
Download raw JSONL data for one-note meaning in English (3.9kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2026-10-21 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2026-10-01 using wiktextract (c1bb342 and 6f96ddf). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
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