unary

adj

1. (not-comparable)Consisting of or involving a single element or component.

   “Her work is a renunciation of the old narrative, a throwing away of the cotton reel, an enunciation of the unary signifier, fort, that is meaningless in itself.”

2. (not-comparable)Of an operation, function, procedure, or logic gate, taking exactly one operand, argument, parameter, or input; having domain of dimension 1.

   “Negation is a unary operation.”

   “Zadeh’s claim is that if the meaning of an expression (X) can be modeling by a fuzzy membership function variable, then the meaning of an expression such as “very X” is simply a membership function over the same variable determined by applying a unary operator to the membership function for X.”

   “On the other hand, blank spaces should not be used for unary operators such as unary minus (−), address of (&), indirection (*), member access (.), increment (++), and decrement (−−).”

noun

1. (countable, uncountable)The unary, or bijective base-1, numeral system.
2. (countable, uncountable)Unary coding, an entropy encoding for natural numbers.