This morning, I was thinking about two words that describe the same phenomenon: "monobrow" and "unibrow". Which one do you use? Which one should I use? Clearly, I should use the one that is etymologically more pure; that is, the version that doesn't mix elements from different languages. OK, then, we know that "mono-" is Greek and "uni-" is Latin. Unfortunately that doesn't help us, since "brow" comes from the Anglo-Saxon (i.e., Old English) "brú". Therefore, we are left with a couple of alternatives:

• In Old English, the first counting number is declined either as ān or āna, suggesting that we could employ it to form "ānabrow". I like the sound of that, though it may mislead one into thinking that the subject is missing eyebrows altogether.
• Taking the Modern English construction a little less literally, perhaps a better choice would be "samodfæstbrú", with the Old English "samodfæst" meaning "joined together". I would shorten that to the euphonious "fæstbrú" (though that might be mistaken for a brand of beer).
• We could combine the Latin prefix with the Latin word for eyebrow, forming the comparatively awkward "unisupercilium".
• Likewise for Greek, arriving at "monophrys".

For the record, it's a variation of the final alternative that wins. The scientific term (at least according to Wikipedia) is "synophrys": "syn-" for "together", and "phrys" from "φρύδι" for "brow".

(No, I have no idea why I decided to share that. But as it turns out, it was an interesting exercise in HTML character entities.)