Once

How to spell once

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce once

What does once mean?

1. adverbOn one single occasion; a single time.
2. conjunctionAs soon as; from the moment that something happens.
3. adverbAt some time in the past; formerly.

Once in a sentence

• adverb

  The committee meets only once a month.

• conjunction

  Once the payment clears, the order will ship.

• adverb

  The building was once a thriving textile mill.

• adverb

  She has been to Japan once in her life.

• conjunction

  The alarm will reset once you enter the code.

• adverb

  This quiet town was once a busy fishing port.

Where does once come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Once began life as the Middle English word 'ones', which was the genitive form of 'one'; in Old English the word for one was 'an', and adding the genitive ending -es to a number produced an adverb meaning 'on one occasion'. Over time the final -es was pronounced with a sharp, unvoiced hissing sound rather than a buzzing z, and scribes respelled the ending as -ce to lock in that pronunciation, exactly as happened with 'twice' (from 'twies') and 'hence'. This is why the word looks so different from its parent 'one' even though they are the same root: the spelling preserves an old grammatical fossil. The same -ce-from-genitive pattern explains the spelling trap, because writers instinctively want to keep the 'on' of 'one' yet the modern form drops the e of one and adds -ce. By the 1500s 'once' had settled into both its counting sense and its conjunction sense, meaning 'as soon as'.

How the word is built

• on- (from one, Old English an)
• -ce (adverbial genitive ending, originally -es)