None

Part of speech: pronoun

Pronunciation: /nʌn/

Definitions

1. The absence of any amount or instance of something; not one; zero
2. The term refers to the complete lack of anything or anyone
3. signifies the concept of emptiness or the idea of nothingness

Etymology: Old English "nān" was a compound of "ne," meaning "not," and "ān," meaning "one," so the word literally meant "not one." That blunt origin survives in its cousins across the Germanic languages: German "kein," Dutch "geen," and Scots "nane" all carry the same idea of "not one." The Latin-derived sense of the word tells a different story. Through Old French "none," it comes from Latin "nōna," meaning "ninth" or "ninth hour," the canonical hour of prayer in the medieval monastic day. English speakers later used "none" to name that same hour, so the word's meaning drifted from a time of day toward a grammatical sense of "not any." The two strands meet in the English word, which keeps the Germanic sense of "not one" while sharing its spelling with the Latin-derived noun.

Synonyms: nothing, not a single one

Antonyms: some, any