Is “None” Singular or Plural?

“None” is is derived from “not one” and since the “not” is an adjective, you can ignore it; all that to say that “none” is singular. So this sentence from an NBC news article is correct, even though it feels wrong.

None of the 103 people on board — 99 passengers, two pilots and two flight attendants — was killed.

“Was killed” feels wrong because of attraction, which was permitted in classical Latin, but not in modern English. Attraction is when a word picks up its grammatical form from a nearby word rather than from the “correct” word. And this sentence has a whole lot of plurals for “was killed” to wade through before you get to the subject, and “none” isn’t a strong singular anyway (People tend to give it its number from the context. When they talk about plurals, “none” becomes a plural, even though it isn’t.).

Nobody’ll criticize you if you get this construction wrong, but you’ll score points with the experts if you get it right.