If anyone could answer this question, it would be bibliophage, but I’d be willing to listen to anybody. Everyone I’ve asked has said they don’t know, but surely somebody must! Nobody will even venture a guess, hoping that someone else will, but in the end, no one has.
Is there a usage difference between anyone/anybody, everyone/everybody, someone/somebody or no one/nobody? Subject versus object? I’ve looked through grammar texts and online. I’ve asked friends, teachers, and fellow obsessive compulsives with no reliable answers. No luck so far, but certainly the teeming millions know.
Maybe that’s baloney, and I can’t back this, but possibly óne is more common in Britain, the other one in America? When I learned English at school, we were taught the British way first (colour vs color and so on), and we were taught to say “…body.” My impression is that it’s more Americans who use “…one,” without any remarkable difference in meaning.
Maybe that’s baloney, and I can’t back this, but possibly óne is more common in Britain, the other one in America? When I learned English at school, we were taught the British way first (colour vs color and so on), and we were taught to say “…body.” My impression is that it’s more Americans who use “…one,” without any remarkable difference in meaning.
Fowler’s classic Modern English Usage, 2nd ed. doesn’t even bother to cover this. All it has is sort of a footnote in a discussion of whether every one (and those other words) should be one word or two. The conclusion? Use anyone, everyone, no-one, and someone in the sense of anybody, everybody etc.
And Eric Partridge’s equally classic Usage & Abusage also talks about somebody and someone and everybody and everyone interchangeably.
That would seem to make them about as identical as you can get.
The “-body” words appear to be older and as such a little “more properly accepted.” My OED (1920s version) doesn’t even have separate entries for the “-one” words as a single word.
As Exapno Mapcase has already said, each pair is mostly interchangeable–with a slight exception for no one/nobody:
From Bryan A. Garner, A Dictionary of Modern American Usage (1998).
Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (1994) contains an entry for each pair, but the entries for anybody, anyone, everybody, everyone, and nobody, no one all deal with whether the pronoun takes a singular or plural verb, not with whether either word is preferable to the other. But the entry for somebody, someone contains this discussion: