Can the word "man" refer to a non-gender-specific person?

Hi Victor,

We'd need to see the entire sentence. "A man" would sound more like a male person, but "Man has long quested to ..." means all of humankind.

If you need to refer to one person at a time, then you can say "a person" or "an individual."

Can you write the entire sentence?

In street talk, "Man" and "guys" are usually taken as genderless.

victor_amelkinwhat is the appropriate gender-insensitive term?

person (plural, people).

CJ

I guess that's an oversimplification.

A group, men, women, or mixed, is often addressed as "guys."

"You guys have been terrific!"

The expletive "man" is used in speaking to a woman:

"Man, I'm really sorry about what happened!"

But the it wouldn't be used as nominative of address:

"Listen to me, Man, this has really got to stop!" At least, th

Hi Barbara,

Thanks for the answer. Recently I was writing a text, where I was
describing some person's characteristics, which are important for
being a good specialist in a certain area. In such kind of texts there
are a lot of sentenses where an abstract person and one's
characterictics are mentioned. In all these cases I used the word
"person", but finally I've got

Hi Avangi,

Thanks for the answer. I suppose that in my case there is rather a formal
style, so the word "man" with the meaning of "guy", "fellow", "chap" or any
similar is not likely to be used.

Right. I hadn't realized this was a formal piece.

As GG suggests, it wouldn't hurt to run one of your sentences by us, in which you use "man."