In addition to the generally accepted taxonomic name Homo sapiens (Latin: 'wise man', Linnaeus 1758), other Latin-based names for the human species have been created to refer to various aspects of the human character.
The common name of the human species in English is historically man (from ), often replaced by the Latinate ' (since the 16th century).
The Indo-European languages have a number of inherited terms for mankind. The etymon of man is found in the Germanic languages, and is cognate with Manu, the name of the human progenitor in Hindu mythology, and found in Indic terms for man (including , , and ).
Latin is derived from the Indo-European root ' , as it were, . It has cognates in Baltic (Old Prussian ), Germanic (Gothic ) and Celtic (Old Irish ). This is comparable to the explanation given in the Genesis narrative to the Hebrew Adam () , derived from a word for . Etymologically, it may be an ethnic or racial classification (after "reddish" skin colour contrasting with both "white" and "black"), but Genesis takes it to refer to the reddish colour of earth, as in the narrative the first man is formed from earth.
Other Indo-European languages name man for his mortality, meaning , so in Armenian , Persian , Sanskrit and Greek meaning . This is comparable to the Semitic word for , represented by Arabic ' (cognate with Hebrew üenà Âà ¡ ), from a root for . The Arabic word has been influential in the Islamic world, and was adopted in many Turkic languages. The native Turkic word is .
Greek () is of uncertain, possibly pre-Greek origin. Slavic also is of uncertain etymology.
The Chinese character used in East Asian languages is , originating as a pictogram of a human being. The reconstructed Old Chinese pronunciation of the Chinese word is . A Proto-Sino-Tibetan ' gives rise to Old Chinese , modern Chinese and to Tibetan .
In some tribal or band societies, the local endonym is indistinguishable from the word for . Examples include: Ainu ', Inuktitut: ', Bantu: ', , possibly in Uralic: Mansi , from Proto-Ugric .
The mixture of serious and tongue-in-cheek self-designation originates with Plato, who on one hand defined man taxonomically as a "featherless biped", and on the other as (), as "political" or "state-building animal" (Aristotle's term, based on Plato's Statesman).
Harking back to Plato's are a number of later descriptions of man as an animal with a certain characteristic. Notably animal rationabile "animal capable of rationality", a term used in medieval scholasticism (with reference to Aristotle), and also used by Carl Linnaeus (1760) and Immanuel Kant (1798). Based on the same pattern are or , (Hannah Arendt 1958), and animal symbolicum (Ernst Cassirer 1944).
The binomial name Homo sapiens was coined by Carl Linnaeus (1758).
The following names mimic binomial nomenclature, mostly consisting of Homo followed by a Latin adjective characterizing human nature. Most of them were coined since the mid 20th century in imitation of Homo sapiens in order to make some philosophical point (either serious or ironic), but some go back to the 18th to 19th century, as in Homo aestheticus vs. Homo oeconomicus; Homo loquens is a serious suggestion by Herder, taking the human species as defined by the use of language; Homo creator is medieval, coined by Nicolaus Cusanus in reference to man as imago Dei.
In fiction, specifically science fiction and fantasy, occasionally names for the human species are introduced reflecting the fictional situation of humans existing alongside other, non-human civilizations. In science fiction, Earthling (also Terran, Earther, and Gaian) is frequently used, as it were naming humanity by its planet of origin. Incidentally, this situation parallels the naming motive of ancient terms for humanity, including human (homo, humanus) itself, derived from a word for to contrast earth-bound humans with celestial beings (i.e. deities) in mythology.