One (pronoun)

One is an English language, gender-neutral, indefinite pronoun that means, roughly, "a person". For purposes of verb agreement it is a third-person singular pronoun, though it sometimes appears with first- or second-person reference. It is sometimes called an impersonal pronoun. It is more or less equivalent to the Scots "a body", the French pronoun on, the German/Scandinavian man, and the Spanish uno. It can take the possessive form one's and the reflexive form oneself, or it can adopt those forms from the generic he with his and himself. The pronoun one often has connotations of formality, and is often avoided in favour of more colloquial alternatives such as generic you. In Standard Modern English, pronoun one has three shapes representing five distinct word forms: one: the nominative (subjective) and accusative (objective, also known as oblique case) forms one's: the dependent and independent genitive (possessive) forms Unlike the possessive forms of personal pronouns and who (its, hers, whose, etc.), one's is written with the apostrophe. oneself: the reflexive form The word one developed from Old English an, itself from Proto-Germanic *ainaz, from PIE root , but it was not originally a pronoun. Pronoun one may have come into use as an imitation of French on beginning in the 15th century. One's self appears in the mid 1500s, and is written as one word from about 1827. Pro-form There is a pronoun one, but there is also a noun and a determiner that are often called pronouns because they function as pro-forms. Pronoun is a category of words (a "part of speech"). A pro-form is a function of a word or phrase that stands in for (expresses the same content as) another, where the meaning is recoverable from the context. In English, pronouns mostly function as pro-forms, but there are pronouns that are not pro-forms and pro-forms that are not pronouns. Examples [1 & 2] show pronouns and pro-forms. In [1], the pronoun one "stands in" for "a / the person". In [2], the relative pronoun who stands in for "the people".