Superman

How to spell superman

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce superman

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does superman mean?

1. nounA man who has, or seems to have, extraordinary strength, energy, or ability.
2. nounIn the philosophy of Nietzsche, an idealised superior human who transcends ordinary moral values; a translation of the German Ubermensch.

Superman in a sentence

• Juggling two jobs and three children, he felt less like a superman every day.

• The seminar examined what Nietzsche really meant by the superman in his later writings.

• No single manager is a superman who can fix every problem alone.

• The playwright borrowed the idea of the superman for the title of a 1903 comedy.

Where does superman come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is an English coinage that brings together the Latin prefix super-, meaning 'above' or 'beyond', and the thoroughly Germanic word 'man'. Its modern fame begins with the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who in the 1880s wrote of the Ubermensch, literally an 'over-man' or 'beyond-man', an idealised figure who rises above conventional values. When the playwright George Bernard Shaw needed an English title for his 1903 play 'Man and Superman', he rendered Ubermensch as 'superman', stitching the Latin super onto the plain English man. The comic-book hero created in 1938 then borrowed the same name and lodged it firmly in everyday speech, where it now usually means simply a man of extraordinary ability. Because both pieces, super and man, are familiar everyday spellings, the word holds no hidden trap.

How the word is built

• super- (above, beyond)
• man (adult male, person)