One (pronoun)


One is an English language, gender-neutral, indefinite pronoun that means, roughly, "a person." For purposes of verb agreement it is a third-person singular pronoun, though it sometimes appears with first or second-person reference. It is sometimes called an impersonal pronoun. It is more or less equivalent to the Scots "a body," the French pronoun on, the German/Scandinavian man, and the Spanish uno. It has the possessive form one's and the reflexive form oneself.
The pronoun one has formal connotations, and is often avoided in favour of more colloquial alternatives such as generic you.
The word one as a numeral is also used as a pronoun, as in one was clean and the other was dirty. It is also used as a prop-word, forming pronominal phrases with other determiners, as in the one, this one, my one, etc. This article, however, concerns the use of one as an indefinite pronoun as described in the preceding paragraphs.

Etymology

One may have come into use as an imitation of French on. French on derives from Latin homo, nominative singular for human, through Old French hom. It is distinct from the French word for the numeral one, un. One is related to old Norse einn, Old German ein and Latin unus.

Forms and usage

One may be used as the subject or object of a verb. It can also appear in other grammatical positions, like in Swedish. It occurs most commonly in general statements, which are true of any person. It may nonetheless sometimes be used with the intention that it be construed as referring to the speaker or as referring to the listener.
Examples of its use:
Notice that unlike some personal pronouns the form of one is fixed—independent of whether it is used as a subject or object. It has a possessive form, namely one's, as in:
Unlike the possessive forms of the personal pronouns, one's is written with the apostrophe. There is no second form analogous to hers, yours, mine, etc., for use without a following noun—one's is not normally used in that position.
There is also a reflexive form of one, namely oneself:
This must refer back to one, not to any other subject.

Royal ''one''

Monarchs, people of higher classes, and today particularly Queen Elizabeth II are often depicted as using one as a first-person pronoun. This is frequently a caricature by the press when they refer to the Queen or senior members of the Royal Family. For example, the headline "One is not amused" is attributed humorously to her, implicitly referencing Queen Victoria's supposed statement "We are not amused," containing instead the royal we. Another example near the end of 1992, which was a difficult year for the British royal family, as the Queen famously quipped "Annus horribilis", the tabloid newspaper The Sun published a headline, "One's Bum Year!"

Alternatives

For repeated ''one''

In formal English, once a sentence uses the indefinite pronoun one, it must continue to use the same pronoun. It is considered incorrect to replace it with another pronoun such as he or she. For example:
However, some speakers find this usage overly formal and stilted, and do replace repeated occurrences of one with a personal pronoun, most commonly the generic he:
Another reason for inserting a third-person pronoun in this way may sometimes be to underline that one is not intended to be understood as referring particularly to the listener or to the speaker. A problem with the generic he, however, is that it may not be viewed as gender-neutral; this may sometimes be avoided by using singular they instead, though some purists view this as ungrammatical .
Examples are also found, particularly in the spoken language, where a speaker switches mid-sentence from the use of one to the generic you. This type of inconsistency is strongly criticized by language purists.

For ''one'' in general

A common and less formal alternative to the indefinite pronoun one is generic you, used to mean not the listener specifically, but people in general.
When excluding oneself, one can use the generic they:
Other techniques that can be used to avoid the use of one, in contexts where it seems over-formal, include use of the passive voice, pluralizing the sentence, use of other indefinite pronouns such as someone or phrases like "a person" or "a man", and other forms of circumlocution.
Occasionally, the pronoun one as considered here may be avoided so as to avoid ambiguity with other uses of the word one. For example, in the sentence If one enters two names, one will be rejected, the second one may refer either to the person entering the names, or to one of the names.