man hour
- noun
- /mæn aʊər/
- Specialized
- My preliminary estimate is that it will take us about 160 man hours for the processing steps.
- thousand man hours
- many man hours
Your income per man hour is in each country is a measure of your productivity.
- Your income per man hour is in each country is a measure of your productivity.
Examples
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Do you know how many man-hours we've spent on this case?
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The labor and man-hours these roads must have taken blow my mind—hundreds of years old.
Blog text (31) -
Your income per man hour is in each country is a measure of your productivity.
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Mother, do you realize how many man hours we have wasted?
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By September 1944, the average number of man hours was cut in half to just over 600,000.
Academic text (2009) -
Billions of dollars and untold man-hours have been spent to change the climate.
Blog text (9) -
The Internet is beautiful in many ways, but one of its most elegant assets is the man-hours that are always put into finding new solutions to old problems.
Blog text (21) -
We've already spent 1,800 man-hours on this case...
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We have spent hundreds of man hours developing that campaign.
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Do you know how many man hours we've spent on this project?
Synonyms
The work one person does in one hour
The amount of work one person does in one hour
Surface Forms
Morphology
The compound 'man hour' is directly compositional: 'man' used generically as 'person' plus 'hour' yields the idea of one person's hour of work. A B1 learner who knows both constituents can infer it denotes a unit measuring labor/time (often expressed cross-linguistically as 'person-hour'), so the meaning is transparently derivable from the parts.
Etymology
Man hour comes from a plain idea: one man working for one hour to do a job. So people use it to count or plan work, meaning the 'amount of work one person can do in one hour'.