Why is the word “nobody” better understood as a quantifier than as a name?

In the philosophy of language, treating the word “nobody” as a name (a singular term) leads to logical paradoxes, such as the suggestion that it refers to a mysterious, non-existent entity. This confusion is famously illustrated in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, where a character is mistakenly treated as a person named "Nobody" because the word is grammatically positioned like a proper noun.1

By contrast, understanding “nobody” as a quantifier resolves these puzzles by shifting the focus from reference to predication. When analyzed as a quantifier, a sentence like “I passed nobody on the road” is interpreted as a statement that the predicate “was passed by me on the road” is unsatisfied by any individual. This approach, championed by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, demonstrates that the sentence is meaningful without requiring the word to denote a specific object, thereby exposing “nobody” as a logical tool rather than a name for a thing.1