human being
noun
Simple meaning
Any living or extinct member of the family Hominidae having superior intelligence, articulate speech, and erect carriage.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
hyoomuhnbeeingSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
ˈhjumənˈbiɪŋ
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
Any living or extinct member of the family Hominidae characterized by superior intelligence, articulate speech, and erect carriage
A person; a large sapient, bipedal primate, with notably less hair than others of that order, of the species Homo sapiens.
Any member of the genus Homo, including extinct species.
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: Any living or extinct member of the family Hominidae characterized by superior intelligence, articulate speech, and erect carriage
Used this way, human being is a specialist word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It turns up most in family or home contexts.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Specialist/technical
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Specialized
- Connotation
- Clinical and technical
- Usage feel
- Technical and specialized
Where it naturally appears
- Family/home
Usage note
In general conversation this sense usually needs explaining — outside its field, people reach for a plainer word.
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.