Person

How to spell person

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce person

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does person mean?

1. nounA single human being considered as an individual.

Person in a sentence

• Only one person at a time could enter the small office.

• The missing person was last seen near the train station.

Where does person come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin persona, which originally meant the mask an actor wore on stage and, by extension, the character or role that the mask represented. There is an old and attractive theory that persona came from personare, 'to sound through', the idea being that the actor's voice projected through the mouth of the mask, though scholars now treat that link as uncertain and possibly an early folk explanation. Over time persona shifted from the mask to the human being playing the part, and then simply to any individual human. English borrowed it through Old French persone in the 1200s, and the modern sense of a single human being settled in firmly thereafter. The same root still lives in 'personality', 'personnel', and the legal idea of a 'person' as a being with rights, all of which keep the steady single 's' and 'on' ending of the original.

How the word is built

• pers- (from Latin persona: actor's mask, character)
• -on (from the root noun ending)