Does "E PLURBUS UNUM" really mean "of many one"?

You are right.My BF,from Rome,studied 12 years of Latin.He agrees.

Translate E Pluribus Unum

EDIT: Sorry, after reading what other people have answered and googling this phrase, I have to feel a bit ashamed and edit my answer a little... it was the motto proposed for the first Great Seal of the United States and is translated as "From many, one" or "Out of many, one", meaning the American determination to form a single nation from a collection of states.

Still, what I said before from a purely "Latin grammar"-point of view, is still true:

You could also translate it as "one from many" or "one of many", as you said.

Actually, you're missing an "i", it's "e pluribus unum", and Latin isn't actually read in the reverse direction, it's read from left to right as is English, but it can still mean "one of many" in English because the word order is more flexible in Latin... It is used for emphasis... in this case the word order emphasizes ONE, it's like building up suspense towards that word... "e pluribus" ("out of many") "unum" ("one").

You could also put it the other way around, it would still be grammatically correct ("unum e pluribus") but the emphasis would be lost/different.

Latin is read left to right.

Let's break down the phrase,

E= is a preposition with a translation of from, out of. this preposition requires the Ablative case, which just means it is an object of the prepostion.

Pluribus= is a noun in the ablative case with a literal translation of "by many" another translation is "with many".

However, in this circumstance, it reads "many" because the preposition is already stated directly in front of it.

Unum= one, unum is in the accusative case, meaning that it just reads "one", and cannot be considered an object of the preposition because it is in the accusative case (Latin defines cases by means of word endings) Therefore it is considered as really coming before the prepositional phrase, only in thought process.

In effect, the entire phrase can literally be read, "Out of Many, One" or "One out of many" the two phrases have the exact same meaning, and either translation is correct.

The reason is, Latin verbs come at the end of a sentence, making the literal translation sound like yoda talk. But, for ease of understanding, we rearrange the sentence to conform to english parts of speech. Thus getting, "One out of Many", the famous statement of the United States of America.

Funny, I thought I was done doing latin. :)

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RE:

Does "E PLURBUS UNUM" really mean "of many one"?

Latin being read left to right rather than right to left wouldn't this translate to "one of many"?

The correct translation in general acceptance is 'from many one" indicating the unified purpose expressed by the individual states in forming the federal government.

it means "Out of Many, One"

Latin is not read from left to right not from right to left.

In Latin words can appear in any order. The meaning of the sentence is determined by the endings (declensions for nouns and adjectives, conjugations for verbs).

So the meaning is determined by the endings of the words not their order.