Plural of "I am nobody important" i.e. "we are <nobody/nobodies> important"

A few days ago some stranger contacted me and I asked who he was. He replied and said:

Nobody important.

Now, it is clearly for a singular subject. One person can say that. But I am now wondering what is its plural form.

If my friends and I are asked a question concerning who we are, I would like to answer the same as above, i.e., "Nobody important" but now the subject is plural (we). How can I answer that?

In short, if someone asks my friends and me who we are, I would like to say "Nobody important" but that is for singular. What would be the plural?

  1. "We are no-ones important"?
  2. "We are nobodies important"?

In my research, I found three other sentences as well but they sound odd to me.

  1. We are not anyone important
  2. We are no one important
  3. None of us is anyone important.

Do they sound natural? If not, what would be an idiomatic expression for that?


When used as a pronoun, "nobody" does not have a plural form. But the predicate of a sentence does not have to have the same grammatical number as the subject.

It's not uncommon to say things like "we are nobody important"/"we're nobody important" or "they are nobody important"/"they're nobody important". I don't know of a good reason to reject sentences like that.

For example, in the 2017 film Star Wars:The Last Jedi, major character Rey says the following sentence:

They were nobody.

(IMDb Quotes page, Daisy Ridley's delivery of the line on Youtube)

This is a line of dialogue, but I don't believe it comes across as or was intended to sound notably informal or strangely worded. I think it sounds like a natural and idiomatic sentence to most English speakers.

"nobody" only has a plural when it's not being used as a pronoun

Aside from being used as a pronoun, "nobody" can also be used as an ordinary noun with the meaning "an unimportant person", in which case it has the plural "nobodies" meaning "unimportant people". But when "nobody" is used as an ordinary noun, you can't use "important" after it like that. You would say "they are nobodies" or "He's a nobody" to mean "They are unimportant people" or "He is an unimportant person". This is somewhat slangy.


There is an idiomatic expression that came to mind, when I read the question, which I think works perfectly well, and is grammatical. It is; however, rather informal but it rolls off the tongue

We're just a bunch of nobodies

It's even in a book title about the founders of Wikipedia

How a Bunch of Nobodies
Created the World's
Greatest Encyclopedia

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Being a "nobody" implies the person is unimportant, it's understood, there's no need to modify the nobodies with "important". According to the American corpus on Google Ngram, the expression "of nobodies" is more popular, at least in its written form, than "nobody" or "no one important".

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