nary

Nary is an archaic or dialectal English determiner and adverb meaning not a single or not any. It is typically used before a noun phrase to emphasize absence, as in “nary a soul was to be seen” or “nary a drop.” The form is largely confined to humorous, literary, or historical writing and is considered obsolete in formal modern English. Etymology is uncertain; it is generally described as a contraction or blending of “not a” in earlier varieties of English.

In mathematics and computer science, n-ary—often written with a hyphen—describes an operation, relation, or data structure that takes n operands. Unary (one), binary (two), and ternary (three) are standard cases; higher-arity terms include quaternary and beyond. Examples include n-ary operations, n-ary relations in databases, and n-ary trees in data structures. The hyphenated form “n-ary” is standard in technical writing; “nary” may appear in informal or nontechnical contexts.

The term thus has both a historical-English usage and a modern mathematical/computer-science usage, with distinct nuances and etymologies.