one
Language: English
Part of speech: pron
Pronunciation: other: /w/
other: /w/
other: /w/
other: /w/
enpr: wŭn
ipa: /wʌn/
rhymes: -ʌn
homophone: won (etymology 1)
enpr: wŏn
ipa: /wɒn/
rhymes: -ɒn
homophone: wan
homophone: won (etymologies 2 and 3)
ipa: /wɐn/
ipa: [wän]
enpr: ōn
ipa: /oʊn/
ipa: /ɔːn/
ipa: /uːn/
rhymes: -əʊn
homophone: own (toe–tow merger)
note: Tanglish, Kerala
ipa: /(w)ɵn/
Forms: form: oneself
form: one's
form: ones
form: wone
form: 1
form: I
Etymology: PIE word
 *h₁óynos
From Middle English oon, on, oan, an, from Old English ān (“one”), from Proto-West Germanic *ain, from Proto-Germanic *ainaz (“one”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₁óynos (“single, one”).
Cognate with Scots ae, ane, wan, yin (“one”); North Frisian ån (“one”); Saterland Frisian aan (“one”); West Frisian ien (“one”); Dutch een, één (“one”); German Low German een; German ein, eins (“one”); Danish en (“one”); Swedish en (“one”); Norwegian Nynorsk ein (“one”), Icelandic einn (“one”); Latin ūnus (“one”) (Old Latin oinos); Russian оди́н (odín), Spanish uno. Doublet of a, an, and Uno.
The use as an indefinite personal pronoun may have been influenced by unrelated French on, although the Germanic languages widely use cognates for the same sense (usually in non-subject function, but also in subject function, e.g. Luxembourgish een).
Verb form from Middle English onen.
Senses: examples: text: Any one of the boys.
text: Every one of the bank’s employees.
text: A good driver is one who drives carefully.
text: Can I borrow an eraser? — Sorry pal, I haven't got one.
text: He's not one to pull his punches.
text: Which happies thoſe that pay the willing lone; / That's for thy ſelfe to breed an other thee / Or ten times happier be it ten for one,[…]
ref: 1609, William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 6”, in Shake-speares Sonnets. […], London: By G[eorge] Eld for T[homas] T[horpe] and are to be sold by William Aspley, →OCLC:
glosses: One thing (among a group of others); one member of a group.
examples: text: She offered him an apple and an orange; he took (the) one and left the other.
text: I am one of the few women who've climbed Everest.
text: Study gives strength to the mind; conversation, grace: the first apt to give stiffness, the other suppleness: one gives substance and form to the statue, the other polishes it.
ref: 1699, William Temple, Heads designed for an essay on conversations:
glosses: The first mentioned of two things or people, as opposed to the other.
examples: text: One’s guilt may trouble one, but it is best not to let oneself be troubled by things which cannot be changed.  One shouldn’t be too quick to judge.
text: My neighbor talks to one like a teacher.
text: It was not far from the house; but the ground sank into a depression there, and the ridge of it behind shut out everything except just the roof of the tallest hayrick. As one sat on the sward behind the elm, with the back turned on the rick and nothing in front but the tall elms and the oaks in the other hedge, it was quite easy to fancy it the verge of the prairie with the backwoods close by.
ref: 1879, R[ichard] J[efferies], chapter 1, in The Amateur Poacher, London: Smith, Elder, & Co., […], →OCLC:
text: She was a fat, round little woman, richly apparelled in velvet and lace,[…]; and the way she laughed, cackling like a hen, the way she talked to the waiters and the maid,[…] — all these unexpected phenomena impelled one to hysterical mirth, and made one class her with such immortally ludicrous types as Ally Sloper, the Widow Twankey, or Miss Moucher.
ref: 1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter II, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC:
text: ‘It's rather like a beautiful Inverness cloak one has inherited. Much too good to hide away, so one wears it instead of an overcoat and pretends it's an amusing new fashion.’
ref: 1963, Margery Allingham, chapter 5, in The China Governess: A Mystery, London: Chatto & Windus, →OCLC:
text: With fresh material, taxonomic conclusions are leavened by recognition that the material examined reflects the site it occupied; a herbarium packet gives one only a small fraction of the data desirable for sound conclusions. Herbarium material does not, indeed, allow one to extrapolate safely: what you see is what you get[…].
ref: 1992, Rudolf M[athias] Schuster, The Hepaticae and Anthocerotae of North America: East of the Hundredth Meridian, volume V, Chicago, Ill.: Field Museum of Natural History, →ISBN, page vii:
text: One has to admire the sheer optimism of modern science: I love the fact that there is such a discipline as astrobiology, whose practitioners' task is to imagine what life might be like on other planets. Yet here on the home planet we have profoundly strange aliens of our own.
ref: 2013 September 6, Philip Hoare, “If we're all Martians, who are the aliens?”, in The Guardian Weekly, volume 189, number 13, page 48:
synonyms: generic you
glosses: Any person (applying to people in general).
examples: text: "driver", noun: one who drives.
glosses: Any person, entity or thing.
Synonyms: sense: unidentified person
word: you
sense: unidentified person
english: in nominative personal case
translation: in nominative personal case
word: they
Derived terms: one drop
one-man
one-man band
one-on-one
thousand and one
thousand one