-person
suffix forming nouns sometimes used instead of -man and -woman or -lady: chairperson; salesperson.
Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014
per•son
(ˈpɜr sən)
n. 1. a human being; a man, woman, or child.
2. a human being as distinguished from an animal or a thing.
3. the actual self or individual personality of a human being.
4. the body of a living human being, sometimes including the clothes being worn: He had no money on his person.
5. the body in its external aspect.
6. a human being or other entity, as a partnership or corporation, recognized by law as having rights and duties.
7. a grammatical category applied esp. to pronouns and verbs, used to distinguish between the speaker of an utterance, the person addressed, and other people or things spoken about. Compare
first person, second person, third person. 8. any of the three modes of being in the Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
Idioms: 1. in person, in one's own bodily presence; personally.
2. one's own person, free from restrictions or influence; independent: Now that she's working, she feels that she's her own person.
[1175–1225; Middle English persone < Latin persōna role (in life, a play, or a tale) (Late Latin: member of the Trinity), orig. actor's mask < Etruscan phersu (< Greek prósōpa face, mask) + -na a suffix]
per′son•hood`, n.
usage: See individual, party, people.
-person
a combining form of
person, replacing in existing compound words such paired, sex-specific forms as
-man and
-woman or
-er1 and
-ess: salesperson; waitperson. usage.: The
-person compounds are used, esp. by the media and in government and business communications, to avoid the
-man compounds (
anchorman; businessman) for individuals of either sex or the
-woman compounds (
anchorwoman; businesswoman) to specify the individual's sex. Some find the new
-person compounds unnecessary, regarding the long-used compounds in
-man as generic, not sex-marked. Alternatives to some of the
-person forms have won acceptance, as
anchor and
chair; other coinages, as
congressmember, have had only marginal use. See also
-ess, lady, -man, -woman. Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary, © 2010 K Dictionaries Ltd. Copyright 2005, 1997, 1991 by Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.