a human being; a person of either sex, as distinct from God, angels, or animals.
This is the basic Greek word for a human being. Unlike the other common word often translated "man," it is not about being male: it names a person as a member of the human race, whether a man, a woman, or people in general. The same word covers the species ("what is a human?"), one unnamed individual ("a certain person"), and people taken together ("before others," "the praise of people").
Most of its range is just these everyday uses sliding into one another by context, which is why they sit under one meaning rather than splitting into separate words. The sense shifts with the setting, not the dictionary: the crowd in a story, the single figure in a parable, the human creature held up against God.
The one place the word gains real weight is in Paul. There it becomes the term for the human being as a creature, the self that can be "old" or "new," "inner" or "outer," the human who is under sin and the human Christ became. The word itself does not carry that theology; Paul loads it by how he uses it, and the reader has to watch the context to see when the plain word for "a person" is doing heavy lifting.