“No” know-how

July 8th, 2009 at 07:00am Barry Wood

“Nobody” is one word, but “no one” is not one.

Interestingly, a nobody can be somebody, as long as it’s someone “of no influence, authority or importance.”

“Nowhere” is also one word, and there can be a there there. As a noun, “nowhere” is “a place that is nonexistent, unknown, remote, etc.” or “a place or state of obscurity.”

As the film “Yellow Submarine” taught us, the “Nowhere Man” was somewhere, and actually somebody, too.

Other useful “no” words are hyphenated, among them “no-account,” “no-brainer,” “no-go,” “no-name,” “no-no,” “no-nonsense,” “no-show,” and “no-lose” and “no-win.”

And did you know that “noway” and the dialectical “nohow” are actually listed as one-word terms? The former is more commonly written these days as two words and “used with the force of an interjection.”

No way! Yes, that way.

Entry Filed under: one word or two?, definitions