‘Some’, ‘any’, ‘every’ and ‘no’ in English

Lee este artículo en español | 02-10-2009| Gramática en Inglés

Instead of trying to remember every possible combination for the words and their accompanying rules, let’s be a bit more clever and look at how the words are formed.

The root words are ‘thing‘, ‘body‘ and ‘where‘.

Additionally, we are going to use the words ‘some‘, ‘any‘, ‘every‘ and ‘no‘ as prefixes: we are going to add them to the beginning of the roots words.

You can choose whichever combination you like, all of them are valid.

Examples

• some + body = somebody
• every + where = everywhere
• any + thing = anything
• etc, etc..

Complete List
Here is the complete list of possible combinations:

• some + thing = something
• some + body = somebody
• some + where = somewhere
• any + thing = anything
• any + body = anybody
• any + where = anywhere
• every + body = everybody
• every + thing = everything
• every + where = everywhere
• no + body = nobody
• no + thing = nothing
• no + where = nowhere

And then it’s easy to make-up phrases like:

• Everybody has something
• Nobody has everything
• Everybody is somewhere
• Anybody can have everything

No Double Negatives

Be careful with double negatives!

You must remember with this type of phrase that in English you cannot normally have two negatives in one sentence.

In Spanish and other languages it is perfectly acceptable to say things like “Nadie tiene nada nunca” (Nobody never has nothing) where we can see that the negation has been repeated three times. This is wrong in English!

English only normally allows us to use one negation in each sentence.

This phrase, for example, is wrong:

“Nobody never has nothing”

It’s wrong because it contains three negations. The correct version would be:

“Nobody ever has anything”

The alternative option is always the ‘any’ prefix: anything, anybody, anywhere.
Are the following phrases right or wrong?

1. Nobody has nothing
2. Nobody is nowhere
3. Nobody has nobody
4. Nobody likes nothing