An ordinary person without special qualities, used to represent the average person that most people can relate to.
Capitalized as 'Everyman' from a famous medieval morality play about a character named Everyman facing death and judgment. The concept became a universal symbol of the common person rather than a king, hero, or noble.
Medieval playwrights invented 'Everyman' as a character to teach lessons to ordinary people—the exact same idea still works in modern stories like movies about regular people facing challenges, proving that humans have always needed to see themselves reflected in stories.
Archetype denoting universal human experience, but historically centered male perspective as default 'universal.' Female experience required modifiers ('everywoman') to be acknowledged, encoding the assumption that maleness = neutrality.
Use 'everyone', 'the average person', or 'any person' to truly capture universality without gendered default assumptions.
["everyone","any person","the average person","people everywhere"]
The need for 'everywoman' as a corrective reveals how 'everyman' claimed false universality; language history shows women's experiences were systematically treated as special cases rather than central.
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