person

/ˈpʌrsn/

/ˈpʌsən/

Other forms: persons

A human being is called a person, and while this applies to an actual individual, it also, in grammar, means the type of person — first person being "I/me," second person being "you," and third person being "he/him," "she/her," or "they/them."

The Latin persōna referred to an actor's mask that created the character being played. This later came to mean "human being," a meaning it still conveys. You can also use it to refer to a person's physical body. I wouldn't recommend crossing the border with any illegal items on your person. Nowadays, the word person replaces "man" to avoid sexism in words such as "congressperson."

Definitions of person

1. noun

   a human being
   “there was too much for one person to do”

   synonyms: individual, mortal, somebody, someone, soul

   type of:

   being, organism

   a living thing that has (or can develop) the ability to act or function independently

   causal agency, causal agent, cause

   any entity that produces an effect or is responsible for events or results
2. noun

   a human body (usually including the clothing)
   “a weapon was hidden on his person”

   type of:

   anatomy, bod, build, chassis, figure, flesh, form, frame, human body, material body, physical body, physique, shape, soma

   alternate name for the body of a human being
3. noun

   a grammatical category used in the classification of pronouns, possessive determiners, and verb forms according to whether they indicate the speaker, the addressee, or a third party
   “stop talking about yourself in the third person”

   types:

   first person

   pronouns and verbs used to refer to the speaker or writer of the language in which they occur

   second person

   pronouns and verbs used to refer to the person addressed by the language in which they occur

   third person

   pronouns and verbs that are used to refer to something other than the speaker or addressee of the language in which they occur

   type of:

   grammatical category, syntactic category

   (grammar) a category of words having the same grammatical properties