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Which is correct: "everyone's life" or "everyone's lives"?

I know that when the pronoun everyone is used as a subject, it takes singular verb agreement (as in the sentence "Everyone was there"). But this by itself doesn't seem to show that the possessive form "everyone's" always acts like a singular possessive noun.

An example of the reverse situation: when the "singular they" is used as a subject, it takes plural agreement, but the possessive form their can be followed by a singular noun. So the verb agreement that a pronoun takes isn't always the same as the grammatical number of a noun after the possessive forms of the pronoun.

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Everyone is singular and, therefore, everyone has one life. Everyone's life is correct.

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  • Unless of course you’re a Buddhist or a cat, in which case everyone has multiple lives and both would be correct, depending on context. Besides, ‘everyone’ may be grammatically singular, but it is semantically plural and acts in plural ways in many contexts. Any anaphors applied to ‘everyone’, for example, must be plural (“Everyone said they agreed”, not “Everyone said *he/she/it agreed”, which would make the pronoun non-anaphoric).
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Nov 28, 2013 at 0:24

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