MAN - The Law Mind Legal Dictionary

MANAuthored

The Law Mind • 1149 words

Definition

In law, "man" carries several distinct meanings depending on context:

1. A human being generally. In its broadest legal usage, "man" encompasses all members of the human species regardless of sex or age. Statutes and legal instruments have long employed the term to mean any person, with courts reading it expansively when the subject matter demands inclusivity.

2. An adult male person. In its narrower and more common sense, "man" denotes a male of the human species above the age of puberty, distinguished from a woman, a child, or a minor male. This usage appears most frequently in older criminal law, domestic relations law, and statutes governing contractual capacity.

3. In feudal law, a vassal or tenant. A feudal dependent who owed homage and service to a lord. The Anglo-Saxon relationship of lord and man was personal and contractual in origin — a bilateral bond, not merely a property arrangement — and "man" in this sense designated the inferior party to that bond. This usage is obsolete in modern law but appears throughout medieval records, land tenure documents, and early equity sources.

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Common Language

Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Primarily used as an adjective meaning "manly" in the fixed phrase "man enough."

Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "A human being, opposed to beast"; specifically, an adult male person as distinguished from a woman or child.

The gap between common and legal meaning lies in breadth. Ordinary speech uses "man" to mean an adult male. Legal usage — particularly in older statutes and treatises — routinely expanded "man" to encompass women and children when context required, making the term a false friend for researchers who assume the common meaning controls. The feudal sense (vassal) has no counterpart in modern everyday English at all.

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Common Confusion

"Man" and "person" have frequently been treated as interchangeable in legal texts, but they are not always so. "Person" is the dominant modern term of legal art for any human being or legal entity; "man" in older sources may or may not include women and minors depending on the document's purpose and jurisdiction. Researchers should not assume that a statute or treatise using "man" was deliberately excluding women — the historical pattern is inconsistency, not uniformity. Additionally, the feudal sense of "man" (vassal) should not be conflated with the biological sense; context of tenure, homage, or lord-tenant relations signals the feudal meaning.

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Why It Matters in Research

The primary research trap with "man" is the scope problem across time. Pre-20th-century statutes frequently used "man" when modern drafters would write "person." Courts interpreting those statutes sometimes construed "man" to include women and sometimes did not, and the results were not always consistent even within the same jurisdiction. When reading historical criminal law materials — particularly Hawkins's Pleas of the Crown, which Bouvier cites directly — "man" in headings and classifications refers to human beings as a class of victim or offender, not to males exclusively.

For researchers using the Law Mind corpus, be alert to two things. First, the Dead Man's Statutes (linked below) are the primary surviving area where gendered language in older evidence rules requires attention: the word "man" in a dead man's statute heading is a historical artifact, not a substantive limitation on who the rule covers. Second, in feudal tenure materials, "man" triggers an entirely separate conceptual framework — homage, fealty, and the incidents of tenure — that has nothing to do with individual identity and everything to do with the structure of land relationships. A search for "man" across the corpus without filtering for context will return results spanning all three meanings with no inherent signal as to which applies.

The term has also been affected by statutory modernization campaigns. Many jurisdictions replaced "man" with "person" in wholesale code revisions during the late 19th and 20th centuries. When comparing an older and newer version of the same statute, the substitution of "person" for "man" may or may not signal a substantive change in scope — it frequently does not, but must be verified.

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Historical Dictionary Support

The major dictionaries agree on the core structure: "man" has a broad sense (all humans) and a narrow sense (adult male), with the feudal sense as a third, specialized meaning. Black's (both editions) and Bouvier align closely, each noting the feudal vassal meaning and citing Spence's Equitable Jurisdiction for the mutual-contract character of the Anglo-Saxon lord-and-man relationship. Bouvier adds the most useful gloss by quoting Hawkins directly to illustrate the broad usage in criminal law classification.

Anderson's entry is fragmentary in the source material but suggests an inclusive reading ("includes all human beings") that aligns with the broad-sense tradition.

What the historical dictionaries largely omit is any acknowledgment of the interpretive instability: they state both meanings without flagging that the two meanings were in active tension in litigation, particularly in cases involving women's property rights, contractual capacity, and voting eligibility. Researchers should not take the dictionaries' even-handed presentation to mean courts were equally even-handed. The historical record shows that when the narrow (adult male) reading served to exclude women from a legal benefit, courts frequently adopted it; when the broad (all humans) reading served to impose a legal burden, courts also frequently adopted it.

The irrelevant material appearing in the source extracts (food articles, bonded warehouses, Rapalje's FRENDWITE) is indexing spillover and has no bearing on the entry for "man."

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Jurisdictional Note

In the United States, most states addressed the "man/person" ambiguity through 19th- and 20th-century statutory construction acts, which typically provide that words importing the masculine gender include women unless context clearly requires otherwise. English law followed a similar path via the Interpretation Act. Researchers working in pre-modernization sources should check whether the relevant jurisdiction had adopted such a rule of construction at the time of the instrument in question.

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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference

Competency of Witnesses — Rule 601 and Dead Man's Statutes (Law Mind Civil Procedure & Evidence Encyclopedia): The "Dead Man's Statute" label itself preserves archaic gendered terminology; the entry explains how these rules operate and who they cover under modern interpretation.

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MANmain

Black's Law Dictionary • 1891

A human being. A person of the male sex. A male of the human species above the age of puberty. In feudal law. A vassal; a tenant or feudatory. The Anglo-Saxon relation of lord and man was originally purely personal, and founded on mutual contract. 1 Spence, Ch. 37.

MANmain

Black's Law Dictionary • 1891

This phrase comprehends all articles or things, whether animal or vegetable, liv- ing or dead, which are used for food, and whether they are consumed in the form in which they are bought from the producer or are only consumed after undergoing a process of preparation, which is greater or less, ac- cording to the character of the article. 19 Grat. 813. Maturiora sunt vota mulierum quam virorum. 6 Coke, 71. The desires of women are more mature than those of men; i. e., women arrive at maturity earlier than men.

MANmain

Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) • 1910

A human being. A person of the male sex. A male of the human species above the age of puberty. In feudal law. <A vassal; a tenant or feudatory. The Anglo-Saxon relation of lord and man was originally purely personal, and founded on mutual contract. 1 Spence, Ch. 37. —Man of straw. See MEN OF STRAW. Chains for the hands;

MANn.

Websters Unabridged Dictionary (1913) • 1913

A human being; -- opposed tobeast. These men went about wide, and man found they none, But fair country, and wild beast many [a] one. R. of Glouc. The king is but a man, as I am; the violet smells to him as it doth to me. Shak. Especially: An adult male person; a grown-up male person, as distinguished from a woman or a child. When I became a man, I put away childish things. I Cor. xiii. 11. Ceneus, a woman once, and once a man. Dryden. The human race; mankind. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion. Gen. i. 26. The proper study of mankind is man. Pope. The male portion of the human race. Woman has, in general, much stronger propensity than man to the discharge of parental duties. Cowper. One possessing in a high degree the distinctive qualities of manhood; one having manly excellence of any kind. Shak. This was the noblest Roman of them all . . . the elements So mixed in him that Nature might stand up And say to all the world "This was a man! Shak. An adult male servant; also, a vassal; a subject. Like master, like man. Old Proverb. The vassal, or tenant, kneeling, ungirt, uncovered, and holding up his hands between those of his lord, professed that he did become his man from that day forth, of life, limb, and earthly honor. Blackstone. A term of familiar address often implying on the part of the speaker some degree of authority, impatience, or haste; as, Come, man, we 've no time to lose ! A married man; a husband; -- correlative to wife. I pronounce that they are man and wife. Book of Com. Prayer. every wife ought to answer for her man. Addison. One, or any one, indefinitely; -- a modified survival of the Saxon use of man, or mon, as an indefinite pronoun. A man can not make him laugh. Shak. A man would expect to find some antiquities; but all they have to show of this nature is an old rostrum of a Roman ship. Addison. One of the piece with which certain games, as chess or draughts, are played.

MANv.

Websters Unabridged Dictionary (1913) • 1913

To supply with men; to furnish with a sufficient force or complement of men, as for management, service, defense, or the like; to guard; as, to man a ship, boat, or fort. See how the surly Warwick mans the wall ! Shak. They man their boats, and all their young men arm. Waller. To furnish with strength for action; to prepare for efficiency; to fortify. "Theodosius having manned his soul with proper reflections." Addison. To tame, as a hawk. [R.] Shak. To furnish with a servants. [Obs.] Shak. To wait on as a manservant. [Obs.] Shak.

Manname

Wiktionary (English) • 2026

Wiktionary contributors • CC BY-SA 4.0 • via Kaikki
Extracted and formatted for display by Law Mind. Source link opens the current Wiktionary page and its contributor history; it is not a frozen copy of this extract.

A surname from Chinese.

Manname

Wiktionary (English) • 2026

Abbreviation of Manchester: a city in England (especially in football).

MANnoun

Wiktionary (English) • 2026

Initialism of Metropolitan Area Network, a large computer network usually spanning a city.

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