Everyone

How to spell everyone

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce everyone

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does everyone mean?

1. pronounEvery person; all the people in a particular group, considered individually.

Everyone in a sentence

• Everyone is welcome to attend.

• Everyone I asked agreed with the plan.

Where does everyone come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word everyone is a compound of two very old native English elements, every and one, and so it belongs squarely to the Germanic core of the language. Every itself descends from the Old English aefre aelc, literally 'ever each', a phrase that fused over time into a single emphatic word for 'each without exception'. One comes from the Old English an, the basic numeral, which is also the ancestor of 'a', 'an', and 'once'. The fixed compound everyone, written as a single solid word and meaning 'every person', became settled in this form during the later medieval and early modern period. The spelling trap is purely visual: it ends in the full word 'one' even though we pronounce it 'wun', so the silent look of the final syllable is what people occasionally get wrong, sometimes drifting toward 'everyon' or splitting it as two words.

How the word is built

• every (each one)
• one (single person)