What is the definition of a man?
A man is a male adult human. Before adulthood, a male child or adolescent is referred to as a boy.
Short answers, pulled from the story.
A man is a male adult human. Before adulthood, a male child or adolescent is referred to as a boy.
A man's genome usually inherits an X chromosome from the mother and a Y chromosome from the father, producing a male karyotype, XY. The SRY gene on the Y chromosome triggers the development of the testes, which govern the rest of male sex differentiation.
The earliest known recorded name of a man may be Kushim, who would have lived between 3400 and 3000 BC in the Sumerian city of Uruk, though the name may have been a title. The earliest confirmed names are Gal-Sal and his two slaves, En-pap X and Sukkalgir, from around 3100 BC.
Women live longer than men in all countries and across all age groups for which reliable records exist. Men face higher mortality from armed conflict, where a study of 13 countries from 1955 to 2002 found 81% of violent war deaths were male, as well as from dangerous occupations, with ten times as many men as women dying on the job in the United States in 2020.
Secondary sex characteristics specific to men include broadened shoulders, increased body hair, an enlarged larynx known as the Adam's apple, and a voice significantly deeper than that of a child or a woman. On average men are taller than women by about 10% and carry greater lean and bone mass and lower fat mass.
The English term man derives from Old English mann, which traces back to the Proto-Indo-European root *man-. Old English mann originally meant person or human being, while the word wer denoted an adult male and survives today only in the compounds werewolf and wergild.
The Mars symbol that represents the male sex was first used to denote sex by Carl Linnaeus in 1751 and is identical to the planetary symbol of Mars. According to Stearn, the shield-and-spear reading is fanciful, and the evidence favors Claude de Saumaise's view that it derives from theta-rho, a contraction of the Greek epithet thouros.