Anyone
pronounAny person at all; anybody.
How to spell anyone
6 letters · 3 syllables
How to pronounce anyone
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does anyone mean?
- pronounAny person at all; anybody.
Anyone in a sentence
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Anyone who wants a refund should keep the receipt.
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The manager asked whether anyone had seen the missing file.
Where does anyone come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
The word anyone is a fairly recent compound, formed in English by joining the determiner 'any' with the noun 'one'. Both halves are native Germanic words: 'any' descends from Old English 'aenig', meaning 'one of a kind' or 'any single one', which itself was built on 'an', the ancestor of the modern article 'a' and the number 'one'. The pronoun 'one' likewise comes from Old English 'an'. For centuries writers used the two-word phrase 'any one' to mean 'any single person', and the closed-up form 'anyone' only settled into regular use in the nineteenth century as a single pronoun. A useful spelling note survives from this history: 'anyone' as a pronoun means roughly 'anybody', whereas the open phrase 'any one' is still used when you want to stress a single item picked from a group, as in 'any one of these books'.
How the word is built
- any (any single)
- one (a person)
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