Every one or everyone?
We use every one, written as two words, to refer back to a noun we have already mentioned:
- I received more than a hundred letters from him while I was away and I’ve kept every one.
Everyone, written as one word, means ‘every person’:
- Everyone enjoyed themselves.
We use every one of before pronouns and determiners:
- There are 107 two-letter words in the dictionary and John Catto, an Aberdeen lorry driver, knows every one of them.
- When Jenkins joined the bank, one of his first acts was to make every one of the bank’s employees reapply for their jobs.
See also
- Everyone, everybody, everything, everywhere