What does "person-year" mean?

One person's working time for a year, or the equivalent, used as a measure of how much work or labor is required or consumed to perform some task.

What is a synonym for "person-year"?

Common synonyms include: man-year.

Person-year

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun

1
One person's working time for a year, or the equivalent, used as a measure of how much work or labor is required or consumed to perform some task.
"Meronyms: person-hour, man-hour < person-day, man-day < person-month, man-month"

Synonyms

All synonyms

man-year

Example

More examples

"Meronyms: person-hour, man-hour < person-day, man-day < person-month, man-month"

Etymology

Compound of person + year, although, as with any such unit of measure (e.g., ton-miles, newton metres), the mathematical relationship of multiplication is simultaneously involved: X persons working during Y years = X × Y = Z person-years.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.