Cara in San Diego, California, wonders why English has monologue and dialogue, but unicycle and bicycle rather than monocycle and dicycle. The dia- in dialogue means “through,” as in diagonal and diameter, not “two,” and duologue is the term for a conversation between two people. English also mixes Greek, Latin, French, and Germanic pieces, so prefixes such as mono-, uni-, bi-, and di- don’t follow one tidy rule. Monocycle is recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary as rare from at least 1869, but unicycle prevailed. Michael Quinion’s affixes.org is a useful guide to English prefixes and suffixes. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “The Greek “Dia-” in “Dialogue” Means “Through,” Not “Two””
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, how are you? I am Cara DeFrius and I am in San Diego, California.
Cara, welcome to the show. What can we do for you?
I am so happy to be here. In college, I was an English and theater major and I always found something curious. In theater, you have monologues if it’s just one person talking and for two or more, it’s called a dialogue. But then there’s unicycles for something with one wheel and bicycles for two. And in classes, it’s a mashup of mono and bi with monocle and bifocals. So why aren’t they monocycles and die cycles and why is there this mono dia uniby situation?
Mono dia uniby situation. Okay, the world is complicated. Thanks for calling.
Let’s get to the heart of this. Right, first the dia in dialogue isn’t from die, affix the prefix meaning two. Instead, it comes from a word meaning through. Because there actually is a word duologue, which is a conversation between two people, which is the companion to monologue.
So it may be misunderstood. And if in theater, they only mean it for two people, fine, that’s fine, a conversation for two people. But in the larger world outside of theater, dialogue can be any number of people. It’s not specifically just two people.
Right. It’s from Greek for through, like diagonal.
Yeah, exactly. Or diameter.
So that solves that.
The other thing is, I think the larger question, if I can rephrase what you’re asking here is, why do we have all these prefixes that mean the same thing? Why do we have di and duo and by? And it’s because our language is a mutts. Heinz 57 English, basically, is what it is.
We get so many of our words. Some of them were created directly in the modern era from Greek and Latin. Some of them came to us inherited through French or German. Some of the ones that we have now look like they came to us directly from Greek and Latin, but they actually traveled through like three other languages to get to us, and they still retained their prefixes and their suffixes and so forth.
So every single word has its own story. You can kind of glom them all together and say, oh, well, here’s the reason that some words have di and some have bi. But there’s no one universal rule for all of them. A lot of it is caprice, really.
The whimsy and the caprice of the people who coined scientific words, for example, is just whatever they felt was superior.
Fascinating.
Yeah.
But monocycle instead of unicycle, maybe.
Maybe.
That’s an old word for it.
Yeah, it probably was. I have actually ridden a six-foot unicycle. I had to be lifted up to a basketball hoop to put it under me. I was holding under the basketball hoop.
For a second there, I wasn’t thinking measurements. I was thinking like appendages when you said six-foot unicycle. I’m like, how does that work? Six legs and one wheel? That’s strange.
Oh, that’s super interesting. Thank you for all that. I was like, this is just weird, right? But I guess English language is weird.
It is.
You’re exactly right.
It is. But I will tell you, I’ve shared this resource on the show before, but I totally think you’re the person for this and probably a lot of our other listeners too. There’s a website called affixes.org. You know, the prefix and the suffix plus the infix, those three together, their category is affix, A-F-F-I-X-E-S.org.
What?
Michael Quinian in the UK put it together. His work is fantastic. And he explains each of these prefixes and suffixes and so forth in detail and talks about where they come from, why we use them, and some words that have them.
I think what I’m hearing is…
Well, there goes my evening.
I was going to say, there goes your weekend, right? I can hear that in your voice, Kara.
All right, Kara, thank you for your call. I really appreciate it. As always, you are always stellar. Thank you so much for answering that for me. Get some sleep now. Don’t stay up all night.
Thank you.
Okay, bye-bye.
You know, I’m looking in the Oxford English Dictionary. Monocycle is a word.
Is this rare?
Yeah, it was rare back to 1869 at least. But same thing, unicycle. It just wins. Sometimes when there’s more than one word for a single item or a single category, one prevails, and it becomes the ensconced term.
That’s right.
English words arm wrestling.
