What speakers mean by it now
In present-day English, nobody is first of all an indefinite pronoun: not any person, the negative counterpart of somebody. It fills the same grammatical slot as no one. Style guides still treat the -body form as a shade less formal, yet it is fully standard in both speech and print. Beside that use sits a countable noun. A nobody is a person dismissed as having no influence, rank, or social weight. The pronoun empties a scene of people. The noun grades a person as not counting.
Those two jobs share a spelling because they share a history. English glued together two native pieces and later let the phrase harden into a single word, then into a social label.
A home-made compound
The origin of the word nobody is compounding inside English. Middle English writers put the adjective no, meaning not any, next to bodi, already available as a word for a person as well as for a physical frame. Early copies write the pair as two words, no bodi or no body, sometimes later with a hyphen. The sense is already no one.
Dating is close but not identical across the standard references. One widely used etymological dictionary puts the two-word phrase around 1300. The Oxford English Dictionary places its earliest evidence before 1400, in the work of Robert Mannyng. The Middle English Dictionary cites Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne in a manuscript from about 1400 whose composition is dated around 1303, using no-body for no one. A historical survey of English indefinite pronouns rounds the arrival of the -body series to about 1400 and names nobody among the first of those forms. The safest account is that the combination is Middle English, in use by the fourteenth century, with Mannyng as the usual first named witness.
Spelling lagged behind use. Two-word writing lasted from the fourteenth century into the eighteenth. Hyphenated no-body appears in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The fused modern spelling is the late winner, not the original form. The word began as syntax: a negative determiner plus a noun.
The first half: a worn-down none
The adjective no is not an ancient one-letter root. Around 1200 it is a reduced form of Old English nan, the source of modern none. The final -n dropped first before consonants and then more generally, leaving no as the ordinary negative determiner. Nan itself is a Germanic negative plus a word for one. The adverb no comes from Old English na, built from ne plus a word meaning ever. The two no’s in English are close relatives, not a single leftover syllable.
Cognates of the negative piece are easy to find across Germanic: Old Norse, Old Frisian, and Old High German all have ne or ni for not, going back to a Proto-Indo-European negative particle. What English did with that particle here is local. Nobody is not inherited as a unit from Proto-Germanic. It is a later English assembly.
The second half: a person-word of unknown depth
Old English bodig meant the trunk of a man or beast, the whole physical structure of a human or animal, and, by late Old English, the main part of a thing. By about 1300 it had stretched to mean a person. That extension is what made no bodi a usable way to say no person.
Outside English the noun is almost isolated. It is related to Old High German botah, but it is not found elsewhere in Germanic. German later lost its own descendant and filled the gap with Leib, originally a word for life, and with Körper, from Latin. The deeper source of bodig is unknown. That is an honest blank, not a puzzle the compound solves. Nobody does not conceal a forgotten prefix or a folk etymology. Its morphology is still readable: no plus a word that had come to mean person.
Other languages built the same idea with different person-words. German niemand joins a negative to man. Latin nemo is a negative plus a word for human being. Those are parallel designs, not etymological siblings of the English compound. English used body because body, among the West Germanic languages that kept the word, had become a way to talk about someone.
How the meaning split
The pronoun sense is the older one and has stayed stable: no person at all. The noun sense is a later social twist. By the 1580s, nobody could name a person of no importance, someone not fashionable in society. One major American dictionary dates that noun to 1583. Once body already meant a person, the leap is short: if a body is someone, then no body can mean someone who barely counts. The insult sits beside the pronoun, which is why English can still say both nobody came and he was a nobody.
Grammar shows another early habit. From the 1540s, writers already used nobody with their. Traditional school rules later called that disagreement. Historically it is old: the pronoun is grammatically singular, but speakers have long treated it as open in gender and number. The pattern is the same one later discussed under singular they.
Nobody also belongs to a set English invented rather than inherited. Indefinite pronouns in -one, built on the numeral, appear around 1200, with everyone among the earliest. Forms in -body come later. Historical work on the series often starts that group with nobody near 1400. For a long stretch the items were not a neat grid. The negative slot favored -body. Every- clung to -one. Only later did speakers treat the words as one paradigm: a quantifier (no-, some-, any-, every-) plus either -one or -body. By the nineteenth century the two endings were competing for the same job.
That competition is still visible. Studies of later English find a style split that has not fully closed: -body forms more at home in speech, -one forms more at home in careful prose. Younger speakers now use a higher share of -one even in speech. The pair nobody and no one remain near-synonyms, but they are not frozen equals.
The fused spelling as a date stamp
Unlike Latin nemo or German niemand, English nobody still looks like the phrase it was. The fused spelling hides only the centuries when it was written as two words or with a hyphen. A concrete marker of the later life of the word is the noun of 1583: speakers had been saying no body for a long time before they started calling a person a nobody.