nobody
Americanpronoun
noun
-
nobodies
plural
pronoun
noun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of nobody
First recorded 1300–50; Middle English; see origin at no 2, body
Compare meaning
How does nobody compare to similar and commonly confused words? Explore the most common comparisons:
Explanation
Use the word nobody to mean "no one," or for someone who's completely unimportant or insignificant. It's not nice to call someone a nobody; everyone wants to be a somebody. If nobody is at home, you can ring the doorbell for an hour and get no response, and if nobody in your family likes pizza, there's no reason to order it for dinner. Since nobody means "no person," it's come to also have the meaning "insignificant person." It's hard not to feel like a nobody when your sister becomes famous after starring in a popular movie.
Vocabulary lists containing nobody
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
“That was sort of a defining battle between North and South, but nobody won it. It was just that the lines had been drawn, and those lines still stand today.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 5, 2026
His testimony was perhaps unsurprising - after all, nobody apart from his wife had been prepared to speak up for him in court as part of the defence's case.
From BBC ● Nov. 5, 2026
About $12,000 went toward the wedding, and the rest went into the house, which has since eaten a new water heater and a roof repair nobody warned us about.
From MarketWatch ● Nov. 2, 2026
Neither book argues for a return to the olfactory world of the past, and surely nobody wants streets where sewage runs in the gutters and rivers are fouled by industrial waste.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 30, 2026
“One bronze piece. You won’t regret it—and money’s hard for a fortune teller, these days, with everyone anxious and nobody clear why.”
From "Impossible Creatures" by Katherine Rundell
For context, they didn't go from nobodies to champions in Pocognoli's one season at the helm.
From BBC ● Aug. 17, 2026
You can think, within two seconds, of stories of nobodies who became somebodies.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 14, 2026
In “Two Prosecutors,” the inert nobodies blocking Kornev’s progress are crisply choreographed, Stalin’s existential choke hold strangling their very spirit.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 26, 2026
A small group of nobodies on TikTok saying dumb shit is not a viral trend that necessitates mass hysteria in response.
From Slate ● Nov. 16, 2023
At school, there were the jocks, the cheerleaders, and the popular kids—and then there were the nobodies like me.
From "Courage to Soar" by Simone Biles
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Get a wordDefinitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
