su·per·man
noun- A man with more than human powers.
- 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: Translation of German Übermensch : über-, super- + 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.
