Which of the following is correct?
- Yesterday, I met one of my friends.
- Yesterday, I met one of my friend.
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6
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If I have only one friend, then I can say: Yesterday I met my one friend. – GEdgar Jul 02 '11 at 13:43
4 Answers
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
RegDwigнt
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5Then again, if you only have one friend and a bent for self-deprecating humour... – bye Jul 02 '11 at 11:28
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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 02 '11 at 12:28
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@VincentMcNabb That's what I used to think too until I heard Australians use it. – moonstar Sep 21 '14 at 17:40
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It would rather be "one of my friends".
Depending on the situation, you may want to use "a friend of mine":
Mathieu Rodic
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@DCShannon: I edited the answer for further explanation, see above. – Mathieu Rodic May 05 '15 at 07:14
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1Okay, I rescinded my downvote.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 05 '15 at 18:34
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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.)
Hellion
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