Word.ws English Dictionary

man on the street

man on the street noun: an ordinary member of the general public, especially one who lacks special expertise.

Noun

man on the street (plural men on the street)

  1. (idiomatic) An ordinary member of the general public, especially one who lacks special expertise.
    • Near-synonyms: layman, everyman
    • Such was the airy way with which, not an illiterate man on the street, but a brilliant woman of the world disposed of a tremendous historical fact.1919, Lee Meriwether, The War Diary of a Diplomat, Dodd, Mead and Company, page 173

Synonyms of man on the street

All synonyms of man on the street

Forms of man on the street

pluralmen on the street

Questions about man on the street

What does man on the street mean?
Man on the street means an ordinary member of the general public, especially one who lacks special expertise.
What part of speech is man on the street?
Man on the street is a noun.
What is the plural of man on the street?
The plural of man on the street is men on the street.

Words near man on the street in the dictionary

  1. man on horseback
  2. man on the Bondi tram
  3. man on the Clapham omnibus
  4. man on the moon
  5. man on the Shau Kei Wan tram
  6. man on the street
  7. man orchid
  8. man orchids
  9. man overboard
  10. man page
  11. man pages

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: man on the street (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-man on the street.ogg.

Cite this entry: “man on the street.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/man_on_the_street. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.