Is there a specific word for a person who has one leg? (2025)

Or is the only term that can be used for it "one-legged"?

Thank you!

For the sake of completeness, the following three words from the OED can technically describe a person with one leg, but they cannot be used in ordinary conversation for this.

uniped n. A person having only one foot (or leg); a one-footed creature.
monoped n. A person, animal, or thing having only one foot or one leg.
monocolous Obs. nonce-wd. adj. One-legged. [from the Greek and Latin name of a fabulous race of men with only one leg]

As you can see above, the answer is no, not really.

See, however, peg leg.

suzi br said:

Hopalong might do it. I must admit to feeling resistant to even make this suggestion, but I have heard it used for someone who has trouble walking.

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Do you know, I have heard about the character Hopalong Cassidy for my entire life, but it did not occur to me until this moment that the character got that nickname because he limped. (I've never seen any of the TV shows or movies.) I just never thought of it as meaning anything, I guess; I heard it so often as a child that I took it as a name, and never broke it out to "hop-along.")

I am not sure he did limp . But we DO use his name for that purpose in our family!

edit to add - further research = Wiki tells us he had a wooden leg.

I see the ususal slang defintion of hopalong is more to do with jumping on a band-wagon than hopping about literally!

Prisca22 said:

Ummm, hopalong sounds perfect and would be perfect for American readers! thanks Suzi br.

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Hopalong?

I grew up watching "Hopalong Cassidy" and he was definitely not one legged. I don't think this will work in the USA.

I think you will have to accept the fact that there is no one-word for one-legged.

I knew a family with a thee legged dog named "tripod", but nothing comes to mine except "monopod" and that is usually:

Packard said:

Hopalong?

I grew up watching "Hopalong Cassidy" and he was definitely not one legged. I don't think this will work in the USA.

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I guess I need to read my own link more carefully, or Wikipedia editors need to write more carefully. Or both. Hopalong had a wooden leg in the original short stories, but apparently not in the show.

I Googled "stumpy" to see if that would work and I found this:

It seems that pob14 was right after all. But Packard isn't wrong either. Wikipedia says:
"Hopalong Cassidy or Hop-along Cassidy is a fictional cowboy hero created in 1904 by the author Clarence E. Mulford, who wrote a series of popular short stories and many novels based on the character.
In his early writings, Mulford portrayed the character as rude, dangerous, and rough-talking. He had a

, hence the nickname.
From 1935, the character—as played by movie actor William Boyd in films adapted from Mulford's books—was transformed into a clean-cut, sarsparilla-drinking hero."

But in any case, the nickname Hopalong had to come from somewhere. I wonder how the movies explained his nickname, if ever they did.

Stumpy might work too. Although I wonder what comes to mind more easily when referering to a stump: a tree stump, a pencil stump, a leg stump...