Anybody

How to spell anybody

7 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce anybody

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does anybody mean?

1. pronounAny person at all; a person whose identity is unspecified.

Anybody in a sentence

• Anybody with a valid ticket may board the early train.

• The manager asked whether anybody had seen the missing file.

Where does anybody come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is a compound built entirely from native English elements: 'any', which descends from the Old English ænig meaning 'one of some unspecified number', and 'body', from the Old English bodig, which originally meant a physical trunk or frame but came to stand for a person as a whole. The pairing began as two separate words, 'any body', literally 'any person', and over time the two fused into a single indefinite pronoun. The same drift toward fusion produced its companions 'somebody', 'nobody', and 'everybody'. The spelling trap is purely that union: writers sometimes split it back into two words or hesitate over the unstressed middle, but it is one solid word with no doubled letters.

How the word is built

• any (one of indefinite number)
• body (person)