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Glite Dictionary
person hour

person hour

1 3.6
The amount of work one person does in one hour
  • noun
  • /ˈpɜrsən aʊər/
  • Specialized
translation icon : hora-persona
  • In order to finish the renovations on schedule, the team worked over 150 person hours this week.
  • person hours for maintenance
  • total person hours

And the two subsystems that that required the most person hours of work were the main engine.

Examples

  • Effort was measured as the total actual person-hours that IS auditors expended on the review of an application in its definition phase.

    Academic text (1992)

  • This work required about 8 person-hours.

    Academic text (2018)

  • Hypothesis 1 regarding software maintenance person-hours was thus confirmed.

    Academic text (1992)

  • That's asking an awful lot of the person's friends, just in terms of total person-hours.

    Blog text (12)

  • The results indicated that the investment of auditing effort in the definition phase yields the greatest reduction in software maintenance person-hours.

    Academic text (1992)

  • Lientz, Swanson, and Thompkins (1978) found that forty-eight percent of annual person hours was spent on maintenance activities as opposed to forty-six percent on new developments in a normal company's data processing department.

    Academic text (1992)

  • The project manager estimated that the task would take about 100 person hours to complete.

  • Tracking the total person hours spent on the project helps the company manage its budget effectively.

Synonyms

man-hour
vsperson hour
  • Specialized
6 3.4

The work one person does in one hour

is written without a hyphen and uses a neutral word instead
man hour
vsperson hour
  • Specialized
2 3.0

The amount of work one person does in one hour

uses a gender-neutral term rather than a gendered one

How Much Work

man-month
  • Specialized
6.5
week
∞ 1.0
person hour
  • Specialized
1 3.6

Surface Forms

person hour singular
person hours plural

Morphology

person + hour

The meaning 'a unit of work by one person in one hour' is directly and compositionally derived from the constituents 'person' (one human) and 'hour' (sixty minutes). This kind of compound measurement is literal and cross-linguistically common, so a B1 learner who knows both words would be able to infer the MWE's meaning.

Etymology

The phrase person hour comes from a simple image: imagine one person working for one hour, and the work they do is one 'person hour'. So it is used to count or plan how much work time a task or project will need.