6

Which of the following is correct?

  1. Yesterday, I met one of my friends.
  2. Yesterday, I met one of my friend.
Improve this question
1
  • If I have only one friend, then I can say: Yesterday I met my one friend.
    – GEdgar
    Jul 2, 2011 at 13:43

4 Answers 4

Reset to default
23

It's "one of my friends". The other option would be ungrammatical.

To spice it up a little, here are the stats from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus:

                     COCA    BNC
one of my friends     251     40
one of my friend        0      0
one of your friends    58      6
one of your friend      0      0
one of our friends     40      7
one of our friend       0      0
one of his friends    182     60
one of his friend       0      0
Improve this answer
3
  • 5
    Then again, if you only have one friend and a bent for self-deprecating humour...
    – bye
    Jul 2, 2011 at 11:28
  • 1
    "One of my friend" sounds like something a non-native English speaker would say, or something from a very uncommon dialect. It certainly grates against my ears.
    – Vincent McNabb
    Jul 2, 2011 at 12:28
  • @VincentMcNabb That's what I used to think too until I heard Australians use it.
    – moonstar
    Sep 21, 2014 at 17:40
6

It would rather be "one of my friends".

Depending on the situation, you may want to use "a friend of mine":

Improve this answer
2
  • @DCShannon: I edited the answer for further explanation, see above.
    – Mathieu Rodic
    May 5, 2015 at 7:14
  • 1
    Okay, I rescinded my downvote. There's still not much reason to use your alternate phrasing, but it doesn't hurt to have alternatives.
    – DCShannon
    May 5, 2015 at 18:34
2

Think of it this way: If you didn't have several friends, you wouldn't need to be specifying that you only met one friend. "One of" is indicating a particular member out of a set with multiple members in it, so it's correct to use the plural form: "One of my friends." If you only have one friend total, then you can just say "Yesterday, I met my friend."

Similarly, when you turn it around thus:

One of my friends is meeting me later

then it's correct to use the singular verb form, because you're still only talking about one person. (Many people get confused because "friends", plural, is right next to the verb "is", but "One" is the true subject of the sentence.)

Improve this answer
1

With the possible exception of set phrases, when you say one of [noun], [noun] is used in the plural form.

Improve this answer

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.