Is "one" always a quantity if not a pronoun?

Question

In medical transcription we are required to type all numbers as digits (unless beginning a sentence). Some phrases include the word "one," such as, "I will get around to it 1 of these days," "...on multiple occasions.  The most recent 1...," "At 1 point..."

Is "one" in these examples a true quantity?

It just feels like it should be spelled out, but in discussing this with others, I could not come up with any rules to back up my instinct.  In the common phrase, such as "one of these days," the whole phrase can be replaced with something else, like, "eventually."  In the second example, the word behaves like a pronoun, where "one" replaces "occasion."  "At one point," could be changed without changing the meaning to "at some point."  Is my point valid?

Medical transcriptionists by nature tend to be picky about wording, so I imagine there are others that would be interested in this answer.

Ash · Answer

In the cases you've given it's more of an idiom than a true quantity, and one that can probably be replaced in most cases with different phrasing that doesn't run into this issue. But if there is a guideline that says "a number is a number and this is how we write it" you don't really have an argument to use one in place of 1 at any stage because the rule says there's no difference.

Answered by Ash on April 26, 2021

Hot Licks · Answer

"One" can be an ordinal number.  Bachelor number one, bachelor number two, bachelor number three.  Of course, one could just as well say bachelor A, bachelor B, bachelor C, so "one" (or even "number one") isn't serving as a quantity, but rather as an ordinal number:

a number designating the place (such as first, second, or third)
  occupied by an item in an ordered sequence

Is "one" always a quantity if not a pronoun?

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