Many teachers and students think that a word like ONE is so weird it just needs to be memorized. I’d like to suggest that digging into etymology makes a word like ONE come alive. ONE used to rhyme with bone. It’s fun to have students take the B off And practice saying ONE how it used to sound in old English or the Anglo-Saxon layer of our language. However, over the years ONE’s pronunciation was influenced by the word ONCE. Thus we have the original spelling and a victim of pronunciation shift.