Other forms: men
A man is an adult male person. The plural is men, which is irregular and among the first irregular plurals a learner meets.
The word has an older, wider sense meaning a human being of either sex, and it survives in compounds — mankind, manned, manpower, chairman — and in the older phrase the rights of man. That use is now widely avoided in careful writing, and humanity, staffed, workforce and chair are the usual replacements. It is worth knowing both, because the older forms are everywhere in books written before about 1980. In informal speech, man is also an exclamation and a form of address, and neither is gendered in practice.
1nounmanAn adult male person.
“A man in a grey coat was waiting outside.”
2nounhumanHuman beings in general — an older use now widely avoided.
“The book is called The Ascent of Man.”
3verbpresentTo be present and working at a post.
“Two volunteers manned the stall all afternoon.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
man is a person.
Old English mann meant a human being, and the male sense was carried by a separate word, wer, which survives only in werewolf — a man-wolf. As mann narrowed to mean male, English lost its neutral word for a person, and it has been improvising ever since.
Proto-Indo-European
*mon-
Middle English
man
English, today
man
From Middle English man. From Middle English man, from Old English mann (“human being, person, man”), from Proto-West Germanic mann, from Proto-Germanic mann- (“man”), from Proto-Indo-European mon- (“human being, man”). a doublet of mann and Manu. 1
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA