homo faber
homo faber noun: the human being viewed as a tool maker and user, or having evolutionarily reached the stage of tool use.
Noun (1)
homo faber (uncountable)
- The human being viewed as a tool maker and user, or having evolutionarily reached the stage of tool use.
- Man working and fabricating and building a world inhabited only by himself would still be a fabricator, though not homo faber: he would have lost his specifically human quality and, rather, be a god—not, to be sure, the Creator, but a divine demiurge as Plato described him in one of his myths.1958, Hannah Arendt, chapter 2, in The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, page 22
- Man is not only homo sapiens or homo ludens, he is also homo faber, the maker and user of objects, his self to a large extent a reflection of things with which he interacts. Thus objects also make and use their makers and users.1981, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Eugene Rochberg-Halton, The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self, page 1
Noun (2) capitalized: Homo Faber
Homo Faber (uncountable)
- Alternative letter-case form of homo faber.
Forms of homo faber
| alternative form | Homo Faber |
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Origin of homo faber
Borrowed from Latin homō faber (“man the maker”, literally “ingenious man”).
Questions about homo faber
- What does homo faber mean?
- Homo faber means the human being viewed as a tool maker and user, or having evolutionarily reached the stage of tool use.
- What part of speech is homo faber?
- Homo faber is a noun.
Words near homo faber in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: homo faber (page history and authors); Homo Faber (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “homo faber.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/homo_faber. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.