- A teacher announces, "There is only one student who failed the course."
Does the teacher’s statement mean anything different from the following version?
- "There is one and only one student who failed the course," said the teacher.
Learn English – The difference between “only one” and “one and only one”
meaningonlyrhetorical-devicesword-choice
Related Solutions
Only the Volkswagen Polo, Golf, Passat, Passat CC and Sharan are available in this country.
This could be clearer. Although common sense says otherwise, this sounds like these are the only cars available in this country. You might instead use
The only Volkswagens available in this country are the Polo, Golf…
If the article is clearly just about VWs, though, you could probably omit Volkswagen from the first version and be just fine.
For the Subaru Legacy, all three options convey the same meaning.
Only the sedan version gets the 1.6-litre/124bhp and 1.8-litre/132bhp engines.
This means that the these engines come in the sedan version and are not available in the wagon, which may not be what you want.
The sedan version gets the 1.6-litre/124bhp and 1.8-litre/132bhp engines only.
This means that these are the only engines available in the sedan (presumably others and perhaps these are also available in the wagon).
The sedan version only gets the 1.6-litre/124bhp and 1.8-litre/132bhp engines.
This means something slightly different. Here only suggests that something is disappontingly lacking, like we might hope for better options, but these two engines is all we get. This use of only is similar to this
I wanted the 2010 Audi R8, but I could only afford the 1988 VW Rabbit.
It's not a matter of "legal" or not, but hand is far more common in OP's construction...
I doubt it's meaningful to explain this as anything other than an accident of linguistic history and idiomatic usage - people tend to repeat the form they hear most often.
Best Answer
In ordinary conversation, only one has the same meaning as one and only one. The shorter phrase is used almost every situation.
In mathematical logic, it's often desirable to make a distinction between zero or one and exactly one. In that situation one and only one is used to indicate that the count cannot be less than one or more than one.