Humankind

How to spell humankind

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce humankind

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does humankind mean?

1. nounHuman beings considered together as a single group; the whole human race.

Humankind in a sentence

• The new vaccine was hailed as a benefit to all of humankind.

• The museum exhibit traced the history of humankind from early tools to modern cities.

Where does humankind come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is a compound word joining two older pieces. The first half, human, comes from the Latin humanus, meaning 'of or belonging to people', which is connected to homo, the Latin word for a person, and even to humus, the word for earth or soil, reflecting an old idea of people as earthly beings. The second half, kind, is native English: it comes from the Old English gecynd, meaning 'nature, race, family, or sort', the same root that gives us 'kin' and 'kindred'. English already had the older compound 'mankind', and 'humankind' arose later, by the 1600s, as a parallel term that many writers now prefer because it does not centre one gender. The spelling is simply the two whole words pushed together with no letters dropped, so the trap is remembering that nothing is lost at the join: human plus kind, all of it.

How the word is built

• human (from Latin humanus: of people)
• kind (from Old English cynd: nature, race, family)