My apologies if this topic has been brought up before. I tried searching, but the search function deemed that noone was too common to search for.
I only recently noticed that noone is a commonly used word. I suppose I’ve seen it before, but attributed it to being a typo instead of the intended spelling.
I’ve always used “no one” and thought of it as two words. To me, noone looks wrong. My mind looks at noone and says noon.
Is noone a regional thing (Canadian here)? Is it a recent phenomenon? Is it two words or one? Would it be used in a formal document or is it used more colloquially?
I don’t know if there are factual answers to this question, so I’ll throw this into IMHO. Please move to a more appropriate forum if this proves to be the wrong one.
In an effort to be clever I planned to mention Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits fame, but wanted to be sure of his spelling so I went to IMDB and just entered “Noone” into the Names search. Try it. You’ll like it.
I have seen the use of “no-one” in books published in the UK.
Logically, “noone” makes sense as a parallel to “someone,” but the problem is that it would then be pronounced “noon” and the meaning lost. So it still remains two words.
The OED does not list “noone”; a search on the term comes up with “no one,” so it’s probably considered an usual variant (though they do have “no-one”).
I read a magazine article about Noone once where the word processor program decided it was “noone” and when it needed to insert a line break, hyphenation ensued. (I am amazed at how often such errors are found in newspapers and magazines today. Whatever happened to copy editing?)
