Hello and welcome to the last Academic Word of the Week before the Eid break!

Today we’ll be looking at an adjective:

UNIQUE

Make sure you get the pronunciation right: /juːˈniːk/

Pronunciation is important when deciding which indefinite article (a, an) to use with UNIQUE. Although the first letter of our word is a vowel, it is actually pronounced with an initial /j/ consonant sound; therefore, UNIQUE is always preceded by the indefinite article ‘a’.

Meaning: Being the only one of its kind.

Example sentence: Each person’s fingerprints are unique.

The word UNIQUE is an example of a non-gradable adjective: i.e., it describes an extreme or absolute quality of something. This means that we cannot use the adverb ‘very’ with a word like UNIQUE. If you want to qualify a non-gradable adjective with an adverb, use ‘absolutely’ or ‘really’.

UNIQUE can also be followed by the preposition ‘to’ followed by a person or thing.

Example sentence: The issue under discussion is unique to Canada.

Academic Word of the Week is taking a break for a couple of weeks, but we’ll be back on 19 May.

Eid Mubarak!