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su·per·man

(spər-măn′)

1. A man with more than human powers.

2. An ideal superior man who, according to Nietzsche, forgoes transient pleasure, exercises creative power, lives at a level of experience beyond standards of good and evil, and is the goal of human evolution. Also called overman.

[Translation of German Übermensch : über-, super- + Mensch, man.]

Word History: Superman, the all-American 20th-century comic-book hero, takes his name from the term the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche used for the ideal superior man: Übermensch. The German Übermensch might also have been translated as overman or beyondman, but George Bernard Shaw's play Man and Superman, published in 1903, helped to establish the English term for Nietzsche's concept as superman. Such a term comes to us through a process called loan translation, whereby the semantic components of a word or phrase in one language are translated literally into their equivalents in another language.

Indo-European & Semitic Roots Appendices

Thousands of entries in the dictionary include etymologies that trace their origins back to reconstructed proto-languages. You can obtain more information about these forms in our online appendices:

Indo-European Roots

Semitic Roots

The Indo-European appendix covers nearly half of the Indo-European roots that have left their mark on English words. A more complete treatment of Indo-European roots and the English words derived from them is available in our Dictionary of Indo-European Roots.

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