Definition of "mononymy"

ISO 704 and ISO 1087 prescribe mononymy as highly desirable for standardized terminologies, but as experience shows, individuals in developing disciplines (having unsettled terminology) are rarely able to agree on mononyms.

1993, Richard Alan Strehlow, Sue Ellen Wright, Standardizing Terminology for Better Communication

As for mononymy, in the context of standardization, the notion that a concept ought to have only one designation seemed both reasonable and desirable.

1997, Knowledge Organization - Volumes 24-25, page 10

The emphasis here is on monosemy (one meaning per term) and one term per concept (which is commonly called mononymy, although this term is avoided in the standard, perhaps because it is less transparent).

2006, Pius ten Hacken, Terminology, Computing and Translation, page 29

What I am calling systematic gazetteers are primarily digital in form and address this lack of mononymy by providing a mix of disambiguating information in complex gazetteer records.

2007, Bassey Antia, Indeterminacy in Terminology and LSP

This new system, mononymy, would classify animals by means of a one-word taxon representing both genus and species in lieu of the binary system of two words, one for genus and the other for species.

1960, Carl John Drake, Collected papers - Volume 3, page 7

Bailey even states that "we should have gained much in simplicity of literature, in clarity and in popular usage, if we had had a mononymy or other arrangement instead of a taxonomic dionymy."

1940 May, Earl Edward Sherff, “The concept of the genus: IV. The delimitations of genera from the conservative point of view”, in Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club, volume 67, number 5