Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

personnel

UK/pɜː.səˈnɛl/US/pɝ.səˈnɛl/
nounB2Very common — you will meet it every day · #1,771 of 15,258leans written

Personnel are the people employed by an organisation. Military personnel, personnel department, trained personnel.

It takes a plural verb and has no singular — one of them is a member of personnel. The department was renamed human resources almost everywhere from the 1980s, which many people regard as a change for the worse. Note the spelling against personal, and the stress on the last syllable.

Definitions of personnel

  1. 1nounpersonnelThe people employed by an organisation.B2

    “Only authorised personnel are allowed beyond this door.”

personnel is employed people.

Where it comes from

  1. French

    personnel

  2. English, today

    personnel

French personnel. a doublet of personal.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

personnel in the wild

  • In addition, the Bundeswehr has approximately 860,000 reserve personnel.

    Bundeswehr

  • The M113 is a fully tracked armored personnel carrier (APC) that was developed and produced by the FMC Corporation.

    M113 armored personnel carrier

  • The Air Member for Personnel (AMP) is the senior Royal Air Force officer who is responsible for personnel matters and is a member of the Air Force Board.

    Air Member for Personnel

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.