unique means being the only one of its kind; unequaled, unparalleled or unmatched. It carries an Arena rating of 1482, earned across 29 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, unique ranks #984 of 17,134 for Most Malleable Words, #2,728 of 17,126 for Most Elegant Words, #4,080 of 17,127 for Words That Escaped Their Books, #7,045 of 17,130 for Most Beautiful Words.
unique is pronounced /juːˈniːk/.
Why “unique” is a great word
Being the only one of its kind; single and solitary or unequaled. From French unique, from Latin ūnicus ("only, single, sole"), from ūnus ("one"), first attested in English c. 1600. Unlike "incomparable," which suggests a peerless degree of excellence, or "particular," which merely denotes a specific quality, "unique" asserts a state of absolute, singular existence. It is a fingerprint’s unrepeatable whorl, the last surviving speaker of a language who carries whole worlds in her mouth, or the specific frequency of a voice breaking over telephone static—each irreplaceable not by degree, but by definition, and therefore burdened with a loneliness that comparison cannot touch.
Etymology
Borrowed from French unique, from Latin unicus.
adj
- Being the only one of its kind; unequaled, unparalleled or unmatched.e.g.“Every person has a unique life, therefore every person has a unique journey.”
- Of a feature, such that only one holder has it.
- Particular, characteristic.
- Rare or unusual.e.g.“And as I look back, it seems to me that we were fairly unique, the sixty of us, in that there wasn’t one good mixer in the bunch.” — 1950, J.D. Salinger, For Esmé—With Love and Squalor:
noun
- A thing without a like; something unequalled or unparallelled; one of a kind.e.g.“The phoenix, the unique of birds.” — a. 1859, Thomas De Quincey, Language:
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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