@kimosaurus Actually, as a native Brit, I have to step in here and say that you're incorrect about the treatment of group nouns in British English.
"The crowd was excited" and "The team is doing well this year" are more proper precisely because multiple individual people when treated as a single group thereby become a singular item. Multiple groups can potentially be pluralised again - "there are far too many decent teams out there" - but that's because the number of groups themselves is plural rather than singular. Other than that, though, a group noun such as "crowd" is always treated as singular, unless it is being broken up again into constituent parts - for example a sentence talking about the MEMBERS of a crowd can use plural verbs depending on their structure ("The people in the crowd are becoming boisterous!") because in doing so the subject becomes the people rather than the crowd as a whole ("The crowd is becoming boisterous!"). This is the proper British grammatical form, not just the American form.
To put it simply, the easiest way to decide whether to use plural or singular form when unsure is to try to work out whether the subject itself counts as a singular or plural subject.
"Everybody" is a collective pronoun which incorporates a group of subjects (in this case, people) into one larger subject (like a crowd or a team). In this case however, the group isn't explicitly named or stated, but is a product of the use of "every" or "each" as a concept implying that "every person involved" is part of a large grouped subject to which the term relates. It therefore counts as a singular subject and requires singular verbs and pronouns in British English as well as in American English (and to my understanding, this is common to most variations of the language). The same is true for nobody, anybody, somebody, each one, everyone, either, neither, and no one!
29
@kimosaurus Actually, as a native Brit, I have to step in here and say that you're incorrect about the treatment of group nouns in British English.
"The crowd was excited" and "The team is doing well this year" are more proper precisely because multiple individual people when treated as a single group thereby become a singular item. Multiple groups can potentially be pluralised again - "there are far too many decent teams out there" - but that's because the number of groups themselves is plural rather than singular. Other than that, though, a group noun such as "crowd" is always treated as singular, unless it is being broken up again into constituent parts - for example a sentence talking about the MEMBERS of a crowd can use plural verbs depending on their structure ("The people in the crowd are becoming boisterous!") because in doing so the subject becomes the people rather than the crowd as a whole ("The crowd is becoming boisterous!"). This is the proper British grammatical form, not just the American form.
To put it simply, the easiest way to decide whether to use plural or singular form when unsure is to try to work out whether the subject itself counts as a singular or plural subject.
"Everybody" is a collective pronoun which incorporates a group of subjects (in this case, people) into one larger subject (like a crowd or a team). In this case however, the group isn't explicitly named or stated, but is a product of the use of "every" or "each" as a concept implying that "every person involved" is part of a large grouped subject to which the term relates. It therefore counts as a singular subject and requires singular verbs and pronouns in British English as well as in American English (and to my understanding, this is common to most variations of the language). The same is true for nobody, anybody, somebody, each one, everyone, either, neither, and no one!