one

[OE] One is the English member of an ancient and widespread family of ‘one’-words that goes back ultimately to Indo-European *oinos. This also produced Latin ūnus (ancestor of French un and Italian and Spanish uno and source of English ounce, union, unit, etc), Welsh un, Lithuanian víenas, Czech and Polish jeden, and Russian odin, all meaning ‘one’. Its Germanic descendant was *ainaz, which has fanned out into German ein, Dutch een, Swedish onion 358 and Danish en, and English one. In many languages the word is used as the indefinite article, but in English the numeral one has become differentiated from the article a, an. One lies behind alone, atone, and only (all of which preserve its earlier diphthongal pronunciation) as well as once, and its negative form is none. The use of the word as an indefinite pronoun, denoting ‘people in general’, dates from the late 15th century. => ALONE, ATONE, ELEVEN, INCH, LONELY, NONE, ONCE, ONLY, OUNCE, UNION, UNIT