I’m tossing this question out as one of those “get a feel for the consensus” attempts. In modern English, “no one” is typically written without a hyphen. The OED says of the hyphenated version that “…[it] seems to have been introduced in the mid 19^th century and to have remained uncommon until the late 20^th century. It remains a minority variant.” There are cases in which one could argue for a distinction between no one’s “not one” meaning and its “none” meaning, and I could see an argument for using a hyphen to distinguish the latter (since the two uses would have different stress patterns):

We couldn’t assign individual blame, since no one of them had made the actual decision; it was a group process.

Vs.

We couldn’t assign blame, since no one among them had made the actual decision; it came from elsewhere.

So here’s the question: to what extent is “no-one” to be considered nonstandard? By calling it “a minority variant,” the OED is being admirably descriptive, but there’s a difference between saying “it’s rare” and saying “it’s rare and it’s considered an error.” I know it looks odd, because I’m not used to seeing it, but I learned long ago not to let observations of frequency transform themselves into mandates without consideration.

Thanks in advance,

Bill Spruiell

Dept. of English

Central Michigan University