man
/man
/- Back on the promenade, I saw a man and a boy trying to fly a kite down on the beach.
- Last week I was talking to a man at the bar of the Hilton hotel at Addis Ababa.
- An Estonian man suspected of plundering millions from hundreds of online bank accounts accounts across Europe was arrested last week.
Synonyms
- A man short, his team mates survived to the end of extra time but lost the penalty shootout.
- If they receive two yellow cards a player will be withdrawn from the game, restricting the team to 10 men.
- But gone are the days when Shankly's men would blast teams away and dominate our domestic game.
Synonyms
- My dad was in the air force, and he spoke about the inequalities he saw between the officers and ordinary men.
- Orders were made as suggestions and officers and men were on first-name terms.
- No commander wants to see his men die in combat but knows that casualties are a part of war.
- Maybe, none of the earlier relationships had worked out because Rohan was destined to be her man.
- It brought out the woman in me and the man in my man.
- I don't have a problem with women hitting on my man… why wouldn't they?
Synonyms
- My father was a trade union man who always had his rosary in his pocket.
- Advocate and author John Mayer looks every inch the rock solid establishment man.
- A battle for power between a union man and an intellectual is looming at Salford town hall.
- He's more of a man than you'll ever be.
- Ironically, her initial portrayal in the show, as more of a man than the men in her Cabinet, may have added to her myth.
- But Don's the quintessential quiet guy who must overcome his cowardice and be a man.
- As soon as we established that Elener was a former Securicor employee, we were fairly sure he was our man.
- Hugh Miller is convinced that Loring is his man, but he can't find any concrete evidence.
- Bounty hunters can use almost any tool at their disposal to find and capture their man.
Synonyms
- They are practically indestructible, outlasting anything that mere mortal men can do to them.
- Need I add that helping and caring for animals is integral to caring for our fellow men?
- How can we solve something as important as global warming if we don't even care about our fellow men.
Synonyms
- Perhaps it may be said that civilization is about to enter the age of the decline of man.
- Genesis in fact hints that there was evil present in the world before the fall of man.
- None the less, equality in the eyes of God laid the foundations for equality in the eyes of man and before the law.
Synonyms
- This is the town which surprised the world with an archeological find in 1921 that came to be known as the Broken Hill Man.
- There was a time where men had to fight to be the head honcho, The Man.
- As the economy plods along, many of us are choosing to take the easy way out - we're going to work for the Man, letting him do the hard work while we work the long hours.
- Some of the more dedicated activists are going to march over to the Guy street police station this afternoon to hold a vigil and voice their displeasure with the Man.
- But all black officers face the same occupational hazard: race-based taunting. ‘You work for the Man!’
- The centre is manned by fully trained technical personnel and all calls are recorded and logged to track and maintain a high service level.
- It is believed passengers have been queueing up to two hours in Terminal 1 because only one of five X-ray machines was manned due to staffing problems.
- Trained volunteers will be manning the call centre to offer independent and confidential information and support to people experiencing difficulties.
Synonyms
- You see a couple in a restaurant or walking on the street and they appear to be so much in love, so happy with each other and you say, man, I wish I could have that.
- ‘Man it sure was different back in the ol days,’ says Gilbert.
- Oh, hey man, how's it going? Did you and Lex have a good time last night?
Usage
Traditionally the word man has been used to refer not only to adult males but also to human beings in general, regardless of sex. There is a historical explanation for this: in Old English the principal sense of man was ‘a human being’, and the words wer and wif were used to refer specifically to ‘a male person’ and ‘a female person’ respectively. Subsequently, man replaced wer as the normal term for ‘a male person’, but at the same time the older sense ‘a human being’ remained in use.In the second half of the twentieth century the generic use of man to refer to ‘human beings in general’ (as in reptiles were here long before man appeared on the earth) became problematic; the use is now often regarded as sexist or at best old-fashioned. In some contexts, alternative terms such as the human race or humankind may be used. Fixed phrases and sayings such as time and tide wait for no man can be easily rephrased, e.g. time and tide wait for nobody. Alternatives for terms such as manpower or the verb man exist: for example, staff or employees, and to staff or to operate.
Phrases
as —— as the next man
as one man
be someone's (or the) man
be man enough to do (or for)
every man for himself and the Devil take the hindmost
make a man out of someone
man about town
man and boy
the man in black
the man in the moon
the man in (or on) the street
the man in white
man of action
man of the cloth
man of God
man of honour
man of the house
man of letters
man of the match
man of the moment
man of straw
man of the world
the man on the Clapham omnibus
man's best friend
a man's man
man to man
men in (grey) suits
men in white coats
my (or my good or my dear) man
separate (or sort out) the men from the boys
to a man
Phrasal verbs
man up
Derivatives
manless
- With the advent of electronics and automation techniques, the prospects of manless coal mining are very promising.
- This article, ‘The manless homes of England’, acknowledges the void left in England after numerous men went to fight in World War I.
- I'd just been going through a pretty manless period.
Origin
Old English man(n), (plural) menn (noun), mannian (verb), of Germanic origin; related to Dutch man, German Mann, and Sanskrit manu 'mankind'.
The English word man goes back to an age-old root that also gave manu, ‘humankind’, in Sanskrit, the ancient language of India. From Anglo-Saxon times, man meant both ‘a person of either sex’ and ‘an adult male’, as well as the human race in general. Shakespeare's Hamlet provided the phrase man and boy, when the gravedigger says, ‘I have been sexton here, man and boy, for thirty years.’ The original man for all seasons was Sir Thomas More, the scholar and statesman who wrote Utopia and was beheaded for opposing Henry VIII's marriage to Anne Boleyn. It came into prominence in 1960 as the title of a play about More by Robert Bolt. A clergyman is a man of the cloth. The writer Jonathan Swift first used ‘the cloth’ to refer to the clergy in 1710. A clergyman's ‘cloth’ had meant his profession since the mid 17th century, and before that other occupations which stipulated a special dress code or uniform, notably the law and the military, had also been referred to as a person's ‘cloth’.
Man for humans in general survives in expressions such as the man in the street. The judge Lord Bowen, who died in 1894, used the man on the Clapham omnibus (Clapham is a district of south London) to refer to any ordinary reasonable person, such as a juror is expected to be. ‘ Man cannot live by bread alone’ is found in two passages of the Bible, one from the Old Testament in Deuteronomy, and the other from the New Testament in the Gospel of Matthew. The proverb man proposes, God disposes goes back to the 15th century, but also reflects a 14th-century French saying. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato provided a precedent for man is the measure of all things, recorded in English from the mid 16th century.
As a way of addressing someone, man goes right back to the Anglo-Saxons and was common in the 18th and 19th centuries, although the old uses tended to sound impatient or encouraging—‘Pick up your feet, man!’ The modern use of man, often expressing surprise, admiration, or delight, came from the speech of black Americans. See also mouse