Read along with the three podcasts, or open the full dictionary entry for People for the definition, Arabic meaning, synonyms and example sentences.
Narrator: Today's word is "People" — noun, pronounced /ˈpiːpl̩/, with the stress on "pee".
Narrator: People means human beings considered collectively, more than one person, and it is the usual plural of the word person in everyday English.
Narrator: In plain English, when you are talking about two or more human beings together, you say people rather than persons.
Narrator: It came into English from Old French peuple, which traces back to the Latin populus, meaning the population or the public at large.
Narrator: A common collocation is young people, which describes the members of a society who are in their teens and twenties.
Narrator: It differs from persons, which survives mainly in legal and official language, as in missing persons, while people is the warm, ordinary choice in speech.
Narrator: There is a second sense too, a countable one, where a people means a whole nation or ethnic community, and the plural peoples covers several such communities.
Narrator: The word is central to politics, human resources, healthcare, market research, anthropology, and of course software design, where teams talk endlessly about real people using real products.
Narrator: So remember: people is the everyday plural of person, and in its other sense it names a nation or community with a shared identity.
Speaker A: Why does English not simply say persons when it means more than one person?
Speaker B: What a lovely question! PEOPLE arrived from Old French peuple and Latin populus, and it settled so comfortably into English that it quietly took the job of the plural of person.
Speaker A: So persons still exists, but it sounds rather official now?
Speaker B: Exactly right. You hear persons in lifts, contracts and police notices, while people does all the ordinary human work.
Speaker A: Example sentences?
Speaker B: First, "Thousands of people queued outside the stadium" — that is simply a large number of human beings. Second, "Our product is built for people who hate complicated settings" — that is a group defined by a shared preference. Third, "The indigenous peoples of the region share several languages" — there the plural peoples means distinct nations or communities.
Speaker A: Common mistakes?
Speaker B: Remember that people is already plural, so you say these people are, never these people is, and never peoples unless you genuinely mean several nations. Also, the spelling keeps that silent o in the middle, peo, and the ending is p, l, e.
Speaker A: Close relatives?
Speaker B: Public is the broad cousin, folk is the friendly twin you use around a kitchen table, and population is the measured alternative that statisticians reach for. But people keeps its warm, human, everyday charm!
Speaker B: Let's use "people" in AI prompts — useful for writing user personas in product design and for drafting inclusive interface copy.
Speaker A: How would that apply when a team is starting a new feature?
Speaker B: You ask the model to ground the feature in real human behaviour.
Prompt: Write three short personas describing the people most likely to use this scheduling feature, including their goals, frustrations and typical devices.
Speaker A: And for the words shown on screen?
Speaker B: Here you ask for plain, respectful interface copy.
Prompt: Rewrite these error messages so they speak plainly to people with no technical background, keeping each message under fifteen words.
Speaker A: What about analysing feedback we already have?
Speaker B: This prompt turns raw comments into themes.
Prompt: Group these customer support messages into five themes and summarise what people are actually asking for in each theme.
Speaker A: One more?
Speaker B: Yes, a database one, because the word often names a table.
Prompt: Design a SQL schema for a people table storing names, contact details and consent flags, and explain each column in one sentence.
People — meaning in Arabic & definition More P courses GL Dictionary