number one

1. 1.

   a reference to yourself or myself etc.; `take care of number one' means to put your own interests first

   Broaderself

   colloquialism

2. 2.

   the first or highest in an ordering or series

   “He wanted to be the first”

   Synonymsfirst

   Broaderrank

   Narrowerformer
3. 3.

   the first element in a countable series

   “the first of the month”

   Synonymsfirstnumber 1

   Broaderordinal number

Questions about number one

What does number one mean?

number one means "a reference to yourself or myself etc.; `take care of number one' means to put your own interests first". That is the primary sense; the word has 3 in total, listed in full on this page.

What is another word for number one?

Close synonyms include first, first, number 1. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is number one a common word?

number one is banded "Familiar" — widely understood, used when the subject calls for it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.