Other forms: people, persons
A person is one single human being. A young person, the person who called, in person.
The plural is people in ordinary use and persons in legal and official language — no persons under sixteen. In person means physically present rather than by telephone or online. In grammar, person is the distinction between I, you and he or she — first, second and third person. Note personal, personality, personnel; and the -person compounds such as chairperson and spokesperson, which replaced the -man forms.
1nounpersonOne single human being.~96%
“The person who found it never came forward.”
2noungrammaticalThe grammatical distinction between I, you and he or she.~4%
“The whole novel is written in the first person.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 24 sentences found in the wild and placed 24 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
person is a human individual.
Latin persona was the mask an actor wore, borrowed from Etruscan. It came to mean the character, then the role in life, then the human being — so the word for a human individual began as a piece of theatrical equipment.
Middle English
persoun
English, today
person
From Middle English persoun. From Middle English persoun, personne et al., from Anglo-Norman parsone, persoun et al. (Old French persone (“human being”), French personne), and its source Latin persōna (“mask used by actor; role, part, character”), perhaps a loanword from ett 𐌘𐌄𐌓𐌔𐌖 (“mask”). In this sense, displaced native man, which came to mean primarily "adult male" in Middle English; see mann. Displaced native Old English hād (“person, individual”). a doublet of parson and persona.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA