monoō

μονόω is a New Testament hapax legomenon, occurring only at 1 Timothy 5:5 as μεμονωμένη, a perfect middle/passive participle in the nominative feminine singular agreeing with χήρα. It is formed from the adjective μόνος with the -όω ending that yields factitive verbs ("to make X"), and it belongs to a wider μόνος family including μονάζω, μοναχός and μόνωσις. LSJ gives the active "make single or solitary" (Homer, Odyssey 16.117; Polybius 5.16.10) and, far more commonly, the passive "be left alone, forsaken" (Iliad 11.470; Aeschylus, Suppliants 749; Thucydides 2.81), plus the construction with a genitive of separation meaning "bereft of, deprived of" (Herodotus 1.102, μεμουνωμένοι συμμάχων; Euripides, Alcestis 296, μονωθεὶς δάμαρτος; Diodorus Siculus 19.43). Thayer glosses "to make single or solitary; to leave alone, forsake," and Thayer with Abbott-Smith specify for 1 Timothy 5:5 the nuance "without children," i.e. lacking family provision; Louw and Nida place it in the domain of being alone or isolated; Moulton and Milligan document the ordinary Koine currency of this everyday verb, which survives into Modern Greek. Inside the Greek Bible the verb is notably rare: it does not occur in the main Septuagint text, though Abbott-Smith records Aquila's use of it at Genesis 49:6, and the sibling verb μονάζω renders the solitary bird of Psalm 101:7 LXX (= 102:7 Hebrew and English). There is therefore no divergence between biblical and extra-biblical meaning; what is distinctive at 1 Timothy 5:5 is the frame, not the sense. Commentators on the Pastorals (Marshall, ICC 578, 586-87; Knight, NIGTC 215, 217; Towner, NICNT; Mounce, WBC 46) agree that the perfect marks an established condition and that the isolation is socio-economic rather than affective, in explicit contrast with the widow of 5:4 who has children or grandchildren. Marshall reads the connecting καί as explanatory rather than as adding a second quality ("a real widow, that is, one left all alone"), a reading Roloff anticipated and Barclay adopts; Wallace's grammar notes the alternative coordinate parsing. The wider unit 5:3-16 remains genuinely contested: Thurston (and Wagener) find an emerging institutional order of widows whose qualifications 5:9-10 lists; Bassler speaks more cautiously of a defined circle short of an office; Barclay argues the passage regulates no order at all but restricts church provision to destitute widows lacking household support, and reads the night-and-day prayer as persistence born of necessity rather than a duty of office. That debate bears on the force of μεμονωμένη (one qualification among several, or the very definition of supportable need) without unsettling its lexical meaning. Barr's warning against loading a single word with theology applies directly here: the theological weight in the verse rests on ἤλπικεν ἐπὶ θεόν, not on the participle.