superman

noun

1. A man with more than human powers.
2. An ideal superior man who, according to Nietzsche, forgoes transient pleasure, exercises creative power, lives at a level of experience beyond standards of good and evil, and is the goal of human evolution. Also called overman.

Origin:

Origin: Translation of German Übermensch

Origin: : über-, super-

Origin: + Mensch, man

.

Word History: Superman, the all-American 20th-century comic-book hero, takes his name from the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's term for the ideal superior man, which is Übermensch in German. Übermensch might also have been translated Overman or Beyondman, but a work by George Bernard Shaw published in 1903 helped to established the English term for Nietzsche's concept as superman. Such a term comes to us through a process called loan translation, or calque formation, whereby the semantic components of a word or phrase in one language are translated literally into their equivalents in another language. German Übermensch is made up of über-, “over, beyond, super-,” and Mensch, “man.” We also find overman and beyondman as calques for the word Übermensch, but they did not take root.