Everybody

How to spell everybody

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce everybody

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does everybody mean?

1. pronounEvery person; all the people in a given group.

Everybody in a sentence

• Everybody in the office received the same memo this morning.

• Everybody was asked to bring identification to the meeting.

Where does everybody come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is a compound built entirely from native English elements, joining 'every' and 'body'. 'Every' itself descends from the Old English phrase 'aefre aelc', meaning roughly 'ever each', a doubled emphatic way of saying 'each and all'. 'Body' comes from Old English 'bodig', which referred to the physical frame of a person but had long been used to mean simply 'a person'. The two were welded into a single pronoun during the Middle English period, paralleling older 'everich body' and the rival form 'everyone'. The spelling trap is the seam between the parts: writers sometimes insert a space ('every body'), which actually carries a different, literal meaning, so the single solid word is what marks the pronoun sense.

How the word is built

• every (each one)
• body (person)