A Word, Please: When ‘each’ isn’t a pronoun, the rules can get tricky

OK, fellow wordy types: See if you can spot the grammar mistake I fixed when editing the following sentence.

“Our team wrote, published and promoted a series of 12 human interest stories that each honors a California veteran who has served our country proudly.”

Don’t see a problem? Don’t feel bad. This was a tough one. In this sentence, the verb “honors” should be “honor.”

If you have an advanced understanding of the word “each,” this edit may seem wrong to you. But hear me out, because this isn’t your typical “each.”

Grammar buffs know that “each” is usually singular, which means it gets a singular verb. “Each has its issues.” “Each knows the way.” “Each is better than the last.”

We can also see the singular nature of “each” in sentences like “to each his own.” If “each” were plural, we’d get “to each their own,” which is clearly wrong.

When “each” refers to a unit that contains multiple individuals — for example, a family — it may be more natural to treat “each” as plural: “A number of families will participate and each have their own priorities.” This is called “notional agreement,” and it’s a legitimate reason to give “each” a plural verb, according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. Otherwise, if “each” could only be singular, we’d have to write: “A number of families will participate and each has its own priorities.” That could work, too. But you can see how the rule loosens up in these situations.

But that doesn’t explain why I changed “each honors” to “each honor” in our original sentence. To understand why the plural verb “honor” is correct, we have to dive deeper into the word “each.”

Those of us who were taught that “each” is singular didn’t get the full story. That rule deals with only one form of “each” — the pronoun form. But “each” isn’t exclusively a pronoun. It can also be an adjective or an adverb. In those cases, “each” is not the subject of the verb. Instead there’s some other noun or pronoun in the sentence that governs the number of the verb.

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Here’s an example from Merriam’s: “They each have too many possible meanings.” There’s no disputing the correctness of that verb conjugation. The alternative, “They each has,” is clearly ridiculous. The subject of the verb is “they,” which is plural, and not “each.”

Another example from Merriam’s: “If we and our Atlantic community partners each take our respective share.” The subject here is the plural “we and our partners.” So “its share” or “my share” wouldn’t work. We need the plural “our share.”

Merriam’s says these are examples of “each” as an adjective. That’s not how I see it. To me, these sentences show “each” in its adverb form, describing not the noun or pronoun but the action. In “We and our partners each take,” I see “each” as modifying the verb “take,” which would make it an adverb.

Back to our original sentence: “We wrote, published and promoted a series of 12 human interest stories that each honors a California veteran who has served our country proudly.”

If “each” had been the subject of the verb — “each honors a veteran” — then the singular verb “honors” would be correct. But that’s not how the sentence is structured. Instead, the true subject of the verb is “stories,” plural. The “each” isn’t a pronoun, so it’s not the subject of the verb. We’re not saying “each honors.” We’re saying “stories honor,” which is why I made the edit.

June Casagrande is the author of “The Joy of Syntax: A Simple Guide to All the Grammar You Know You Should Know.” She can be reached at [email protected].