What is a characteristic of a monostable multivibrator?

A monostable multivibrator is a circuit with exactly one stable resting state (the prefix 'mono-' meaning one). It will remain in this stable state indefinitely until an external trigger pulse is applied. When triggered, the circuit temporarily switches into its unstable 'alternate' state. It remains in this state for a specific, predetermined amount of time—usually set by a resistor-capacitor (RC) timing network—before automatically dropping back to its stable resting state. For this reason, it is commonly referred to as a 'one-shot' circuit. This differs from an astable multivibrator, which produces a continuous square wave (no stable states), and a bistable multivibrator (flip-flop), which stores data by remaining indefinitely in either of two stable states.