I don't know if there had ever been a topic about this issue in the forum.
But I hope you can give me a satisfactory answer to my question yet:
Is there a difference in the usage of the words "somebody" and "someone"? (the same question goes for "anybody", "anyone", "everybody" and "everyone")
It is a little bit confusing that I found different answers about this question in the www. Somewhere I read there is really no difference, elsewhere I read there is a little difference. So what?
As far as I can think of it, there is no real difference, except perhaps that there are some contexts where one is stylistically more appropriate than the other.
Based on the entries for “somebody” and “someone” it is clear that the conventional definitions for these two words are identical. In fact, “someone” refers to “somebody” in order to clarify its own meaning. The history of these words is nearly identical as well. Each was generated in Middle English, entering the language within two years of each other; “somebody” was first used in 1303, while “someone” was used in 1305. Why are these words, ostensibly utilized in the exact same manner, coexistent in the English language? While Occam’s razor may rule the laws of the cosmos, it would seem not to apply to the English language where such inefficiency occurs. However, this is not the end of the story for the two words. By referencing a corpus and studying the exact patterns of usage for the words, the difference between “somebody” and “someone” can finally be exposed. In this paper I am interested in examining the usage of this word pair in four contexts: collocations, levels of specificity, agent of action and, finally, transitivity.The bulk of this study is done through the COBUILD corpus of British spoken English. When “somebody” and “someone” are entered as a search query, the results are interesting:
Somebody: 4027 total instances (434.4/million).
Someone: 1600 total instances (172.6/million).
Assuming that these words are, indeed, equal, then it would make sense if each word was used a number of times roughly equivalent to one another, yet this is not the case. “Somebody” is used roughly 1.5 times more than “someone.” This variation might be due to differences in the sounds between the two words. For instance, “somebody” has three syllables, the first two carrying a rather heavy stress pattern whereas “someone” is a two syllable trochaic rhythm. Perhaps “somebody” is used more often because of the desire for speakers to emphasize their point. There are many speculations about sound and word use, but these are all very difficult to prove. Instead, the corpus will give us empirical evidence as to the patterning of the usage of these two words to shed light on their difference.
The first test to determine whether or not these words are different is to simply examine the lists of strong collocations. This was done in the corpus using the “c” command for t-score collocations and the “C” command for Mutual Information.
Source: Cobuild Dictionary
I agree with Easterner and Helen completely. It seems to be an idiosyncrasy of the English language. Other languages like Irish , Spanish, Romanian etc. use just one term 'aon duine', 'alguien' , 'cineva' for both words. Of course, these languages have their share of idiosyncrasies too.
It seems to be not only an idiosyncrasy of the English language. In the German language there is exactly the same phenomenon. "Irgendeiner" (the equivalent of "someone") and "Irgendjemand" (the equivalent of "somebody")!
Thinking about the contexts in which both German words are used I would say there is no real nameable difference between them.
Thus I reason that there isn't a difference between "somebody" and "someone" in everyday conversation, too.