Some

How to spell some

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce some

What does some mean?

1. determinerAn unspecified amount or number of something.
2. pronounA portion or number of people or things, as opposed to all of them.

Some in a sentence

• determiner

  She poured some milk into the coffee before the meeting.

• pronoun

  Some of the staff prefer to work from home on Fridays.

• determiner

  We need some volunteers to cover the weekend shift.

• pronoun

  He ate some of the cake and saved the rest for later.

Where does some come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is one of the oldest words in English, descending directly from the Old English sum, meaning 'a certain one' or 'an unspecified amount'. It traces back through the Proto-Germanic sumaz, which carried the sense of 'a certain quantity', and ultimately to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning 'one' or 'together' that also lies behind the Greek hamos 'in some way' and the Latin similis 'like'. The word has kept its job for well over a thousand years, always pointing to an unspecified quantity or unnamed member of a group. Its short, plain shape never changed much, but the spelling traps modern writers because it sounds exactly like 'sum', the arithmetic total borrowed from Latin summa. Remembering that 'some' is the native, vaguer word, while 'sum' is the precise mathematical one, is the surest way to keep them apart.

How the word is built

• some (single morpheme, from Old English sum: a certain one, a portion)

Words that sound like some

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• sum: A total amount, especially of money, or the result of adding numbers together.