Man

The category takes in Cisgender men and trans men without distinction. A trans man has a male gender identity that does not match a female assignment at birth, and an Intersex man may have sex characteristics that do not fit what is typically expected of male biology. Neither fact puts either outside the word.

Where the word man narrowed

The root is Proto-Indo-European \man-, visible in Sanskrit and Avestan manu- and in the Slavic mǫž, man or male. English took it through Old English mann, meaning person or human being. The sex-specific word was wer, or wǣpnedmann, and it lost the competition: after the Norman Conquest man began to mean male human, and by the late thirteenth century it had largely replaced wer*.

Wer survives in a pair of fossils. Werewolf is Old English werwulf, literally man-wolf, and wergild is man-payment, the compensation owed for a killing. Both preserve a stage of the language in which the general and the male senses were carried by different words, which is the arrangement English gave up and most of its neighbours kept.

Merriam-Webster still lists the older order. Its first sense for the noun is an individual human, with an adult male human given underneath it as the particular case, and a further sense covering a man of a stated category by birth, residence, membership or occupation, which is where the -man compounds come from. Woman is one of them: Old English wīfmann, literally woman-person, built on the same mann.

Who counts as a man

Most cultures use a gender binary in which man is one of the two genders, and the great majority of men are cisgender. The Williams Institute estimated in 2025 that 1.0 per cent of the United States population aged 13 and over is transgender, which makes trans men a small fraction of the men in any count and does nothing to move them outside it.

Simple English Wikipedia states the position without hedging: "What makes someone a man is not agreed on globally." That is a report of a disagreement rather than a move inside it, and it is the accurate sentence. The reference works describe bodies in one section and the gender category in another, and they do not treat the first as a definition of the second.

How the sources describe male bodies

A man's genome usually carries an X chromosome from the mother and a Y from the father, and sex differentiation of the male foetus is governed by the SRY gene on the Y chromosome. Androgens at puberty produce the secondary characteristics the reference articles list: broadened shoulders, more body hair, an enlarged larynx and a deeper voice, greater muscle and bone mass, lower body fat, a narrower pelvis. Men are on average about ten per cent taller than women, and the average height of men worldwide in 1996 was 171 centimetres.

The articles are careful about what this describes. It is a typical adult male body and not a test anybody has to pass, and the same encyclopedia that lists the characteristics also notes that what makes someone a man is not settled.

Why men die earlier than women

Women outlive men in every country and every age group for which reliable records exist, and in the United States men are less healthy than women across every social class, with the worst figures among men who are not white. Some of the gap is occupational and violent. A study of conflicts in thirteen countries between 1955 and 2002 found that 81 per cent of violent war deaths were male, men are over-represented in dangerous occupations and in deaths at work, and conscription has fallen mostly on men.

Some of it happens in the consulting room. Doctors give men less service, less advice and less time per encounter than they give women, and a retrospective analysis of people infected with the common cold found that doctors underrated men's symptoms and were readier to attribute symptoms and illness to women. Some of it follows from what men are expected to be. The association of masculinity with confrontation raises mortality in regions where violence is common, and sudden economic shocks are linked to heavier drinking and psychological stress among men, in a pattern attributed to the difficulty of providing for a family where providing is treated as "the essence of masculinity".

Traditional gender roles have defined men's activities and opportunities across recorded history and underwrite patriarchal societies, which gives men considerable power, particularly over women. Men are over-represented as perpetrators of violence as well as victims of it. The men's movement, itself various, has grown out of the criticism of those roles.

What the Man means in slang

A definite article turns the word into something close to its opposite. The Man is American slang for authority, dating to 1918 in the sense of the boss. In the Southern United States it came to cover any person or group holding power, and from the 1950s it served the American underworld as a code word for law enforcement. Stick it to the Man is the usual injunction. A 1969 article in U.S. News & World Report described the avowed aim of the Yippies as destroying the Man, meaning the system of government, and an advertisement in Easyriders in December 1979 carried a line telling California residents to add six per cent sales tax for the Man.

The same phrase runs the other way as praise, addressed to whoever is standing out among their peers at that moment, sometimes for something trivial. Professional wrestling uses it for the top stars in the business. The oldest names of individual men are older than any of this: the earliest known recorded name may be Kushim, who lived between 3400 and 3000 BC in the Sumerian city of Uruk, though the word may be a title rather than a name, and the earliest confirmed names are those of Gal-Sal and the two people he enslaved, from around 3100 BC.