One is the number of God, The One, the Creator. One is considered the "original number"; it is the "unit" off which we base everything else.

According to numerology, people can be classified based on their number. This "number" is derived using gematria, usually, although other tricks are also utilized. Figure out your number however you like, I guess.

"One people" in numerology are supposed to be dominants, leaders. They are tough people that don't shake easily and stick to their goals. (This is because if you divide or multiply by 1, the result is the original number, unchanged.) Sometimes "one people" are also assumed to be stiff and stern, probably because of the upright stance of the number itself.

One is the number of the point; the unity. It signifies the point in geometry because, well, duh; the point is one-dimensional. One is the creator, but it is also powerless to become anything new without help. There's a reason this is a male number, the number of the Father: it is the creative power, but it is of course sterile without the female two.

Interesting fact: In Ancient Greece, one was not considered a number. "A number" was any grouping of things; and one was not a group, it was just the thing. But you think that's bad; in those days, Zero didn't even exist.


ASCII Art Representation:


Character Etymology:

A pictograph of a single extended finger.

Other Intesting Facts:

This is often the first Kanji character taught to students as it is the easiest to write and recognize.


on-yomi: ICHI ITSU
kun-yomi: hito hitotsu

Nanori Readings:

Nanori: kazu i itu iru katsu ten hajime hi hitotsu makoto

English Definitions:

  1. ITSU: One.
  2. hito: One.
  3. hito(tsu): One unit.
  4. hito-: one unit of.
  5. ichi-: one, a certain; the whole; the same (time); petty; worthless.
  6. -ichi: the best, the first.

Unicode Encoded Version:

Unicode Encoded Compound Examples:

: hitori (a person)
: itchigatsu (January)
一指: isshi (a finger)

  Previous: (no previous)  |  Japanese Kanji  |  Next: right

One is the name of a character, played by Ron Perlman of "Beauty and the Beast" fame, in the French film, "City of Lost Children." He is a strongman in the local freakshow, able to burst free from chains by breathing air deeply into his lungs and expanding his chest cavity. There seems to be an allusion in the film that he's actually a child, who has the body of an adult. This would explain his seemingly moronic qualities.

His adventure begins when he loses Denree, his little brother("petit frere" in French), and goes on a quest to find the boy and bring him back to safety. Eventually he gets caught up in a plot to steal a safe. It is this act of fate, that eventually leads him towards his final goal. In the process meeting various, interesting characters along the way, who are as strange and unique as he is, if not more-so.

One is a suffix that many graffiti writers add to their names to signify that they are the first graffiti writer in a particular area to use that name.

For example, if you were a graffiti writer named "Knife" and you were the first person to write "Knife", in say, Salt Lake City, you would write "Knife-One".

Theoretically, writers will also add a two, three, etc, to their name if their is a graffiti writer that also has their name, but often they will either pick a different name or just claim to be the first. I think, that, perhaps, graffiti writers just like adding "one" to the end of their names.


A story

"Let's get this out of the way because I'm not going back to these questions. Yes, I am his son."


"I was named after my father, who was named after his father, who was named after the wizard in the King Arthur myth. Of all the names in the world, why did my great-grandparents choose 'Merlin'? Damned if I know. Do you know why your grandparents were given their names? Well good for you. I sure as hell don't."


"Yes, it's true what they say. And if you need me to repeat it for your recorders, here it is. My father was insane. A hundred years ago they would have called him a mad scientist. Now we have a different name for it. We call it a bipolar disorder. Sounds less romantic than mad scientist, but that's what it is. Dr. Frankenstein was probably bipolar. He knew what he was doing but he couldn't stop the compulsion that came from his quick onset depressions. Making life out of nothing made him feel better, maybe. Why? God knows. Ask Mary Shelley. As for me, I'm just the schmuck who had the bad luck to be born to a couple of nutcases."


"I had a reasonably normal childhood except that my parents were both obsessive-compulsives and one of their compulsions involved making me repeat specific lessons five times for each step I took when I walked through the kitchen in our house. The rest of the house was okay. I could do what I wanted, but when I was in the kitchen I had to repeat whatever was the lesson of the day five times each time I took a step."


"I learned a lot that way. I learned to derive the fine structure constant from elementary quantum mechanics."


"I learned a lot of other things too. Some of them you would call unconventional. Like the number you want to know. We'll get to that in a minute."


"The thing that makes me happiest in this world is the way the sky looks at five AM in the summertime. That deep indigo blue that seems like birth. Like everything is going to be okay because the world is going to be filled with a new day soon. That's what I like most."


"The thing that makes me the saddest in my life is the hate mail I get. The other day, a bunch of kids in a religious school somewhere in the midwest sent me some letters. Some kids begged me to reveal the number. He said if I revealed the number to his pastor, I would be forgiven for all my horrible sins. Others hoped I would die soon without telling anyone. One kid just drew a picture of me hanging on a gallows. It was like drawn by a fifth-grader. One of those hangman spelling games, only there was an arrow pointing to the dead body saying, 'I wish this was Merlin Farrow'. What did I ever do to that kid? His parents must have put him up to it. See, I got kids in this world who hate me and they never met me. How do they know they don't like me? We might like to catch a ball together or go to a movie if I met this kid. He might think I was a nice guy, but instead, he thinks I've committed a terrible sin, he thinks the world would be better if I was dead."


"Some days I wake up and look at my hands. They're my hands, you know? These hands, they never did one thing bad that I can think of. I mean, we've made mistakes. I've dropped things and when I was younger, I got into a few fights. But nothing terrible. I like these hands. I like that they're mine. I could see if these hands killed someone, that everyone should get into a big huff over everything. But they didn't. They were just connected to me when it happened. I just watched the number on the screen. Then I took the machine apart like my father wanted me to. That's all they did."


"I think if any of you really ever got the opportunity to know me, you'd think I was an okay guy. Really. You'd want to have lunch with me. Maybe go to a ball game."


"Yes, it's true. The whole thing is true and that's what's bugging all the smart people in the world, and all the people who want us to believe they're smart. I know something that surprises people. Do you know what I mean? It's not so much the exact number--the exact weight of the human soul. People didn't think you could measure the weight of the human soul. It wasn't something people felt comfortable with. You know? So you have these religious people, all out there with their faith and love and all of a sudden you quantify it, and you're screwing around with God's unalterable truths. And so you're evil. And others, they view it as a validation of what they already know. They always knew we had a soul, so why shouldn't it weigh something? And then there are the skeptics who don't want to believe anything, and so the whole thing is flawed."


"I mean, they believed my father when he measured the mass of the bottom quark. They believed him when he adjusted the mass of the electron. They added a couple of terms to Schroedinger's equation because of his findings. But then he uses the same technology to find the mass of the energy of life itself, and suddenly his entire body of work is flawed."


"And then there are the wackos. Some of them just want to kill me so they say they killed the only guy on the planet who knew the mass of the human soul. And then some of them want to kill me to keep me from telling everyone what it is. And then some threaten to kill me to get me to tell them. All this has done for me is to put me at the business end of a lot of knives and gun barrels and all I did was stand there and watch the quantometer."


"By the way, there'll never be another quantometer. My dad destroyed the notebooks with his equations and the plans before he died."


"No, I'm not nearly smart enough to reproduce the plans. And he never shared the mechanics with me."


"My mother was a saint. She was crazy, but she was a saint. She died of ovarian cancer when I was twelve. Her death pushed my father over the edge. That drove him to invent the quantometer. When you think of the benefit my father brought to the world in those intervening thirty years, you might think my mother's death was a boon to mankind. But I don't. I'd take back all the material science and quantum physics just to have her kiss me on the cheek and make me hot chocolate when I come inside from shoveling the driveway. You say it's selfish, but I would make the trade."


"You think it's selfish that I don't share the number. Others think I'm selfish because all this attention is put on me. They say I could end all of the fuss if I was just out of the way, meaning dead. Well let me tell you all something. My life is all I have. I like my life. I like biscuits and butter for breakfast in the morning. I like music and thunderstorms and watching the Giants win ball games. Why do I have to make the supreme sacrifice because you can't come to terms with your lives? It's you who can't live knowing I have something in my head you want to know. Not me. Couldn't we all just go back to the way it was before I discovered my father's last wishes?"


"It went like this. He turned on the quantometer, climbed in and sealed himself inside. The fact he was hermetically sealed would have killed him in a couple of hours. He'd have suffocated, or the gamma burst would have killed him or the graviton wave would have stopped all his nerves from firing. But he brought with him a couple of bottles of that morphine the oncologist gave him for the pain. He drank both. I saw him do it, but only out of the corner of my eye. I had to measure the total mass-energy content of the machine before and after he died. I saw the number change at the moment his soul left the measurement chamber. Then I waited six days to tell everyone, just to be sure he was dead. That's what he wanted. He wanted me to know. He wanted me to be sure I knew the weight of his soul, and then he wanted to be sure no one else would know unless I told them.."


"He left me explicit instructions and I followed them to the letter. I dismantled the machine and destroyed what I could. The number is in my head."


"Because I spent so much time compulsively studying math and physics and biology, I not only know the number, which represents the entire energy-mass content before and after my father's soul left, but I also know what it means."


"Because the number is what it is, I think everyone's soul weighs exactly the same amount. I've said that before, and people hate me for it. Some people want to think they have heavy-weight souls so they want to kill me for saying there's no such thing."


"You know, part of me thinks, 'Merlin, if you tell them the number, they'll all just go away and you can go back to your regular old life.' Part of me thinks, 'Let the bastards go on wondering. Tell the bastards nothing. After you're dead they're going to believe what they want, anyway. They'll say, 'He never really knew. It's not possible to know that.' But really, I just want to go back to liking everyone. I want everyone to like me but now, that's not possible anymore, is it? You won't let it happen."


"Some people think the number will prove the existence of God. Some think it proves the existence of life after death. When you get down to it, all it proves is that the energy that flows through our nerves is something you can measure. That shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. Einstein already proved energy and mass are interchangible. A dead body should weigh less than a live body full of electric impulses. It's should really be that simple."


"Except for the fact my father did a previous experiment when he and my mom got married and I was conceived. Now that one--that one is going to cause a lot of trouble because--and write this down--before my father made the really accurate quantometer, he had a less accurate one and when I was conceived, well he and mom did it in the measurement chamber and what did they find out? Well, within engineering tolerances, the weight of the chamber increased with my conception. So something flew into that totally impenetrable chamber, somehow."


"So now I can imagine there'll be a lot of activists out there really angry for me telling them you can measure the weight of a human soul when it flies into a body. Like I'm pro or anti abortion or whatever."


"But really, everyone. Really. Why is the whole human race hung up on conflict? Why do we have to be disagreeable with each other? Why does one of us have to be right--that we have to find the right path and all of us have to be on it? Why have we made it a sin to be wrong? And who says anyone is wrong or right? Can we know these things? Look at me--look at all of you looking at me as if I could say something to you that would be an ultimate truth or a satanic falsehood. All I ever wanted when I was a kid was a friend I could trade baseball cards with. I mean, Willy Stargell. Joe Pepitone. Roger Maris. Mickey Mantle. Willy McCovey. Babe Ruth. Joe DiMaggio."


"Think of it. If you didn't believe the number was real, I wouldn't be here. Nobody would care about me. The reason I'm stuck in your legal system has nothing to do with my protection, and everything to do with the cruelty of your own thoughts. How can you be so heartless? Is it more important that you be right, than know the truth? What makes your discomfort with the idea of this data worth my life?"


"Yes, my father loved me. He loved everybody. He didn't have a mean bone in his body. Think about it. He gave everything away except the quantometer. He published all this data except this. This one thing. It's like the story of the Garden of Eden. It wasn't a simple mistake. Now you're going for the apple with machine guns."


"I think he did this to teach me something. Maybe he was trying to teach us all something."

*** ***

Okay. Cut it here. Let's go to that clip of that FBI guy. Fifteen thirty-two and six hundreths. It's there. That file. That one. Come on. Hey. Did you fall asleep? What's the matter?

It's so sad.

Yeah. Sad. That's why we're telling the story. Make people cry. Come on. Gimme that FBI clip.

*** ***

"Yes. Forensics deals with this kind of evidence collection all the time. There was nothing unusual about this except for maybe the degree of the damage. DNA testing shows the blood on the paper came from several sources that we've identified as belonging to some of the press corps who were near him when the bomb went off, the suspect who was killed in the struggle, the suicide bomber, and Farrow himself. What you can see in this picture is the reconstructed note. What's interesting is not what he's written, but what he's erased. From what we've been able to construct, it seems that before he wrote this, there was a number, which you can see here. Here. Take a look at this false-color image. There. It's obvious now."

*** ***

Hold here. This is where we'll have Jones do the voice over. What. Don't look at me like that.

I don't see why we don't focus on his note. The number is practically irrelevant to the whole story.

The number is everything. The very existence of this number is everything. That's why you're not a producer. You have an uncanny knack of completely missing the salient point. What he wrote is nothing. It's emotional blather.

He died for this. It wasn't fair.

People die unfairly every day. Get over it and give me the physicist. Clip one-sixty-eight. One minute twenty four. Go.

*** ***

"Right. But it's incomplete, see? He may as well thrown a handful of dirt in front of us and said, 'There, find it.' He's mocking the entire scientific community. If you ask me, the whole thing was a huge sham. There was never any number. It was a cheap publicity stunt to monopolize on a great man's legacy."


"The units. He never said what the units were. See? Look--you can ask me how much gas fits in my car and I can tell you twenty. But you don't know if I mean twenty gallons or twenty liters or twenty ounces. You can surmise twenty gallons because of what you know about cars, but the truth is, maybe I have an engine that runs on an order of magnitude less gas than any engine you ever heard of and I can run on twenty milliliters of gasoline, what takes you twenty gallons. So, see we really know nothing with this number."


"No, I don't think it's a diversion from the real number. I know the very idea of that number can't exist, so the number doesn't exist."

*** ***

Finally. Great. Back to number one. Add Jones' wrap-up. We're done. I'm going to call Rosenstein at TLC and let them know this one is in the can. What? What the hell is wrong with you?

I don't think we told the story. It's wrong. I watched the same tapes you did. I don't know. I feel like we told the wrong story.

You do your job. I'll do mine. We told the story there was to be told. Done.

What we said was that a crazy man invented a number, ignited the whole world for a couple of weeks, and then was killed by a radical suicide bomber from the goddamned--what were they? The "Jesus Borrowed my Soul Liberation Front." If you ask me, they get more press out of this than our story. And you said before the very existence of the number is what mattered, but that doesn't come out anywhere in this piece.

The fact he materialized his fantasy, is what I meant.

So you don't think there's any possibility that what he said was true?

Whether what he knew was true or not--that's not my business. I just tell it like I see it. This is journalism. Not editorial. Look. The weight of the human soul, who cares? It doesn't change whether or not there's going to be a bad hurricane season this year. It doesn't change Nelson winning the election by judicial fiat. Nothing is changed. It's a blip. We move on. That's what we're saying here. What? Will you stop looking at me like that, you're really pissing me off.

Everything's changed. Every single frigging thing.

They don't even know what it means. That scientist said, it could be electron volts or it could be ounces or pounds, or because of the Heisenberg principle, it could be the weight of the sun.

But a man knew it.

Cut it out. I'm tired. Let's go. Come on. Down to McGinty's. I'll buy you a couple of beers, you'll feel all better. Next one is that Doctor Doolittle guy in Africa, the male Dian Fosse--the guy who talks to tigers. He thinks what he's doing is real, too. Now let's go.

I feel like, like, maybe one person got THIS close to seeing God and living to tell us about it.

I hear McGinty's pouring a new beer, an import. They assure me it will make you see God.

Why isn't anyone interested in telling his side of the story? I think...You don't believe it, do you? After everything you've seen, you don't think there is another side of the story.

But there is a beer side of the story that interests me. Tomorrow I'm interested in the guy who thinks tigers speak telepathically. What's that? His note?

"One person. Each person. Life goes on."

Yes it does. So does beer. Wait. What the f-- Stop, would you?

What if it's been there throughout history? Maybe he wasn't the first.

They've been burning heretics at the stake for years. Now, can we get the hell out of here?

I thought he was a scientist.

This isn't funny anymore.

You have backups of these clips, right?

What do you think?

End of file.

One (?), a. [OE. one, on, an, AS. an; akin to D. een, OS. en, OFries. en, an, G. ein, Dan. een, Sw. en, Icel. einn, Goth. ains, W. un, Ir. & Gael. aon, L. unus, earlier oinos, oenos, Gr. the ace on dice; cf. Skr. eka. The same word as the indefinite article a, an. &root; 299. Cf. 2d A, 1st An, Alone, Anon, Any, None, Nonce, Only, Onion, Unit.]



The dream of Pharaoh is one. Gen. xli. 25.

O that we now had here But one ten thousand of those men in England. Shak.





From the one side of heaven unto the other. Deut. iv. 32.


Closely bound together; undivided; united; constituting a whole.

The church is therefore one, though the members may be many. Bp. Pearson


Single in kind; the same; a common.

One plague was on you all, and on your lords. 1 Sam. vi. 4.


Single; inmarried.


Men may counsel a woman to be one. Chaucer.

One is often used in forming compound words, the meaning of which is obvious; as, one-armed, one-celled, one-eyed, one-handed, one-hearted, one-horned, one-idead, one-leaved, one-masted, one-ribbed, one-story, one-syllable, one-stringed, one-winged, etc.

All one, of the same or equal nature, or consequence; as, he says that it is all one what course you take. Shak.<-- = all the same --> -- One day. (a) On a certain day, not definitely specified, referring to time past.

One day when Phoebe fair, With all her band, was following the chase. Spenser.

(b) Referring to future time: At some uncertain day or period; some day.

Well, I will marry one day. Shak.


© Webster 1913.

One, n.




A symbol representing a unit, as 1, or i.


A single person or thing.

"The shining ones." Bunyan. "Hence, with your little ones."


He will hate the one, and love the other. Matt. vi. 24.

That we may sit, one on thy right hand, and the other on thy left hand, in thy glory. Mark x. 37.

After one, after one fashion; alike. [Obs.] Chaucer. -- At one, in agreement or concord. See At one, in the Vocab. -- Ever in one, continually; perpetually; always. [Obs.] Chaucer. -- In one, in union; in a single whole. -- One and one, One by one, singly; one at a time; one after another."Raising one by one the suppliant crew." Dryden. <-- one on one, (in a contest) contesting an opponent individually; go one on one, (in a game, esp. basketball) to contest one opponent by oneself. -->


© Webster 1913.

One (?), indef. pron.


It was well worth one's while. Hawthorne.

Against this sort of condemnation one must steel one's self as one best can. G. Eliot.

One is often used with some, any, no, each, every, such, a, many a, another, the other, etc. It is sometimes joined with another, to denote a reciprocal relation.

When any one heareth the word. Matt. xiii. 19.

She knew every one who was any one in the land of Bohemia. Compton Reade.

The Peloponnesians and the Athenians fought against one another. Jowett (Thucyd. ).

The gentry received one another. Thackeray.


© Webster 1913.

One, v. t.



The rich folk that embraced and oned all their heart to treasure of the world. Chaucer.


© Webster 1913.
