anēr

This is the ordinary word for a male person who has grown up. It is the counterpart to the word for a woman and stands apart from words for a child or a boy. Where the more general word for a human being looks at someone simply as a person, this word looks at someone specifically as a man.

The range of this meaning is wide but unified. It covers a man simply being counted in a crowd, a man named as the subject of a story, and a man singled out as upstanding or important. The New Testament also uses it in a respectful way to address a gathering, and it names the male partner in a marriage. These are not separate ideas about different things but the same idea (a grown male) seen in different settings, which is why they share one core.

Two of these settings are distinct enough to list on their own below: the husband, and the formal way of addressing a room full of people. The rest are the plain everyday use of the word for a man.

When this word names a married man in relation to his wife, English needs the word husband rather than man. The shift is not a different idea about maleness but the same word seen inside a marriage bond, where it names the woman's male partner.

The context usually makes this plain: the word appears alongside the word for wife, or in passages about marriage, divorce, and widowhood. The New Testament letters use it heavily in their teaching on marriage, where wives and husbands are addressed together.