Personnel

How to spell personnel

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce personnel

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does personnel mean?

1. nounThe people employed by an organisation or engaged in a particular service.

Personnel in a sentence

• The company cut costs by reducing the number of personnel on each shift.

• All military personnel must report to the base before midnight.

Where does personnel come from?

Language of origin: French

This word came into English directly from French in the early 1800s, where personnel was originally an adjective meaning 'personal' or 'of persons', the counterpart of materiel ('equipment, supplies'). The pair was used in French military and administrative writing to separate the people of an organisation from its physical resources, and English borrowed personnel in exactly that sense: the human beings who make up a body or service. Both words trace back to the Latin persona, which first meant the mask an actor wore on stage and later came to mean a character, a role, and then a person. The double n and the single l at the end are the giveaways of its French parentage, and they are precisely where English writers slip, because the more familiar word 'personal' has the opposite pattern of one n and a different ending. Remembering that personnel arrived as a foreign noun about staff, not as a relative of 'personal', is the key to keeping its spelling straight.

How the word is built

• person (human being)
• -nel (French noun/adjective ending, from Latin -alis)