Nobody

How to spell nobody

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce nobody

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does nobody mean?

1. pronounNot any person; no one at all.
2. nounA person of no importance, influence, or status.

Nobody in a sentence

• pronoun

  Nobody answered the phone at the office all afternoon.

• noun

  He started as a nobody in the mailroom and ended up running the company.

• pronoun

  Nobody knew the new password until the manager shared it.

• noun

  The critics dismissed her as a nobody, but her novel became a bestseller.

Where does nobody come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Nobody is a transparent native English compound, formed simply by joining 'no' with 'body'. The word 'body' comes from Old English 'bodig', which referred to the physical trunk or frame of a person, but from early medieval times English speakers also used 'body' to mean a human being in general, much as we still say 'somebody' or 'anybody'. By the 1300s writers were pairing 'no' with 'body' to mean 'not any person at all', and the two words gradually fused into a single word over the following centuries. The same pattern produced its close relatives 'somebody', 'anybody', and 'everybody', all built on that older sense of 'body' as a person. The single-word spelling is the standard one today, though writers occasionally slip and write 'no body', which actually means a literal corpse or physical mass rather than 'no person'.

How the word is built

• no (not any)
• body (person)