We investigate the notion of soficity for monoids. A group is sofic as a group if and only if it is sofic as a monoid. All finite monoids, all commutative monoids, all free monoids, all cancellative one-sided amenable monoids, all multiplicative monoids of matrices over a field, and all monoids obtained by adjoining an identity element to a semigroup without identity element are sofic. On the other hand, although the question of the existence of a non-sofic group remains open, we prove that the bicyclic monoid is not sofic. This shows that there exist finitely presented amenable inverse monoids that are non-sofic.

We have corrected a small mistake in (and then suitably refrmulated) the statement of Theorem 6.1 (we needed the "Left-cancellative" hypothesis on M. It will appear in SEMIGRUOP FORUM