Somebody

How to spell somebody

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce somebody

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does somebody mean?

1. pronounAn unspecified or unknown person.
2. nounA person of importance or notable status.

Somebody in a sentence

• pronoun

  Somebody left an umbrella by the office door.

• noun

  After years of hard work she finally felt like somebody in her field.

• pronoun

  She hoped somebody would answer the phone before it stopped ringing.

• noun

  He always wanted to be somebody rather than blend into the crowd.

Where does somebody come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Somebody is a native English compound formed by joining the determiner 'some' with the noun 'body', and it has been in continuous use since the Middle English period, around the 1300s. The word 'some' descends from Old English 'sum', meaning 'a certain one' or 'an unspecified amount', while 'body' comes from Old English 'bodig', which originally meant the physical frame of a person. In older English, 'body' was commonly used to mean simply 'a person', a usage that survives in fixed phrases such as 'nobody', 'anybody', and the old song line 'if a body meet a body'. When those two pieces fused, they produced a single pronoun meaning 'an unspecified person'. The spelling trap is precisely that fusion: although it began as two separate words, modern standard English writes it as one solid word, so the temptation to split it into 'some body' must be resisted unless you literally mean a physical body.

How the word is built

• some (an unspecified quantity or one)
• body (a person)