A singleton is a single person or thing of its kind, especially one that stands alone in a group. In card games, it means having only one card of a particular suit.
“Singleton” combines “single,” from Latin “singulus” (one at a time), with the suffix “-ton,” used in nouns. It arose in English in the 17th century and became standard in card-playing language. The idea then spread to mathematics and computing to mean a set or instance with only one member.
Singleton is a great example of a word that jumped from card tables to computers; in programming, a ‘singleton’ is a pattern where only one instance of a class exists. The core idea never changes: one where you might expect many. Language often recycles game vocabulary into technical jargon.
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