man-day
Americannoun
-
man-days
plural
Usage
What does man-day mean? Man-day is a unit of measurement referring to the amount of work that one person does in one day. Man-day is often used in accounting and other business contexts, especially when estimating and budgeting for how much work it will take to complete a project, as well as how long it will take and how much it will cost. For example, if a team of three people takes two working days to finish a project, it takes six man-days. Of course, man-days don’t just count work done by men. A neutral alternative term for man-day is person-day. Example: We estimate that it will take about 150 man-days to complete the walkway, so make sure we budget for that.
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of man-day
First recorded in 1920–25
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
They had 40 customers, paying from $100 a man-day for special one-shot jobs to $750 a month on yearly or seasonal contracts.
From Time Magazine Archive
In Kentucky, for example, productivity has dropped from 23.6 tons of coal mined per man-day in 1969 to 16.9 tons in 1977; in Illinois, the plunge has been from 26.4 tons to 14.9 tons.
From Time Magazine Archive
The number of man-days lost to stoppages plunged - from 33.6 million in 1974 to just 2.8 million in 1976.
From BBC ● Jun. 24, 2025
Allen and his ilk have worked most weekends to get the work done, logging about 35 man-days on the project that is, by lookout standards, some rather light lifting, he says.
From Washington Times ● Sep. 23, 2016
Microsoft estimates that building the virus likely took 10,000 man-days of labor by top-rank software engineers.
From Newsweek ● Dec. 13, 2010
The owners were adamant on the wildcat provision because 2.5 million man-days were lost that way in the coal mines last year, ten times the average for all industries.
From Time Magazine Archive
The work was all done by farm laborers hired by the month and 100 man-days of such labor were required, excluding seven days work of a mason brushing and troweling the surface.
From Concrete Construction Methods and Costs by Halbert Powers Gillette
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
