Not one, and not any
In present-day English, none is the usual way to say that a quantity, a group, or a remainder comes to zero. As a pronoun it covers both not any of a set and no person at all: none of the keys fitted; none remained; none of them spoke. It can also mean no part of something, as in none of this belongs here. A thinner adverbial use still scales degree or comparison: none the wiser, none too pleased, none the worse. The core is absence, counted against one.
That arithmetic is not a modern gloss. It is the word’s original make-up.
Inherited, not borrowed
The origin of the word none is native Germanic, not a loan from French or Latin. Old English already had nān with the senses not one, not any, no person, and not the least part. Middle English carried the form forward as non, none, noon, and close variants before the modern spelling settled. Historical dictionaries place the earliest English evidence in the Old English period, well before 1150; several put written use before 900.
A later folk account treats none as a clipped form of no one. The chronology runs the other way. None is the older, single word. No one is a later two-word phrase built from the reduced negative no plus one. The pronoun did not shrink out of that phrase; the phrase grew beside an already existing pronoun.
A negator glued to a numeral
Old English nān is a compound of ne, not, and ān, one. In that strict sense none is the negative of one, and also of the later indefinite articles an and a, which themselves come from the same numeral. The pairing is reconstructed further back as Proto-West Germanic nain and Proto-Germanic nainaz: the negative particle plus ainaz, one. Behind those sit familiar Indo-European pieces, a negative of the *ne type and the numeral that also yields English one.
Whether the fused form was already present in the parent Indo-European language, as a prefixed n- plus the word for one, or was assembled later in Germanic is not settled. The anatomy, though, is not in doubt: a negator attached to a counting word, then worn into a single lexical item.
A parallel, not a direct parent, shows up in Latin. Classical nōn, not, is often explained as a similar fusion of an older ne with oinos, one, through a form such as noenum. That Latin path is itself debated among etymologists. English later borrowed the prefix non- through French. The borrowed prefix and the native pronoun look like close kin on the page; historically they are at best cousins, products of the same habit of saying not one in two different branches.
Sister languages kept the compound and assigned it different jobs. Old Norse had neinn. Dutch still uses neen as a spoken no. Old High German and modern German turned nein into the everyday particle of refusal. Scots kept nane. Frisian forms such as naan and neen sit in the same family. English is unusual in keeping a full pronoun none while also grinding the same word down into the determiner and particle no.
How the adjective shrank, and how a grammar myth grew
By late Old English, nān was already available as an adjective meaning not any. From about 1600 that adjectival use largely contracted to the shorter no, except in a handful of set phrases, especially before a vowel or in frozen comparisons: none other, none the worse, none too soon. The split resembles an and a. The extra n was useful before a following vowel, then survived as a fossil after the ordinary determiner had become no.
Adverbial uses grew around the same stem, and the handbooks do not all date them alike. One widely used etymological account puts none as by no means in the 1650s and as in no respect or degree near the end of the eighteenth century. Other historical dictionaries treat a sense like to no extent as already medieval. What can be said without stretching the evidence is that the adverb is later and narrower than the pronoun. In living English it mostly lives in none the plus a comparative, and in none too plus an adjective.
One modern usage argument still leans on the etymology and overreads it. Because none contains the old word for one, some guides insist it can take only a singular verb, as if it were always a stand-in for not a single one. Historical practice does not support a hard rule. The word has been treated as both singular and plural since at least the ninth century, in early English and in later literary prose, including a seventeenth-century Bible translation that used a plural verb with none when listing vessels that were not of silver. The choice today is mostly a matter of viewpoint: not a single individual, or not any of the group. Both have long pedigree.
Two look-alikes are easy to mix with the pronoun and should be kept apart. A separate English none, historically pronounced like known, names the ninth canonical hour, from Latin nōna, the ninth hour after dawn. That is a homograph, not a child of Old English nān. In recent American usage the pronoun has also been recycled as a noun for people who name no religion, a label that plays on the homophone with nun. Neither later life rewrites the Germanic compound.
What German kept as a particle
The sharpest snapshot of the old formation is not a Latin footnote but a German one. German nein is the same not-plus-one word, reassigned to answering a yes-or-no question. English gave that answering job to no, itself a worn-down none, and left none to stand where a pronoun still has to mean zero of a set. The word never stopped doing arithmetic. It still means, at bottom, not one.