A name for one human
In ordinary English, person means a single human being: one individual rather than a crowd, an animal, or an object. Law stretches the same noun to a company that can hold rights and duties. Grammar uses it for the speaker, the addressee, and whoever is spoken about. Those jobs look unrelated until the history is laid out. The origin of the word person is a borrowing, not a native Germanic coinage, and the oldest clear sense behind it is a theatre mask.
Borrowed twice, from French and from Latin
Around 1200, English writers were using forms such as persoun for an individual human. The immediate source is Old French and Anglo-Norman persone or parsone, already meaning a human being in the twelfth century. Latin persōna sat behind that French noun, and English also took the Latin form more directly. Oxford treats the English word as mixed in origin: partly French, partly Latin. Modern French still has personne. Spanish and Italian keep persona; Portuguese has pessoa; German Person is the same international loan.
This was not how Old English had named a human. The native word was mann. As Middle English went on, man narrowed toward an adult male, and the borrowed person filled the gap for a human of either sex. The two words are not etymological cousins. People, now the everyday plural of person, is another separate borrowing, from Latin populus through French. Persons remains available, especially in legal and official prose, but it is no longer the usual plural in speech.
Mask, role, then human
Latin persōna did not begin as a general word for a human. In classical use it first named the mask an actor wore: often wood or clay, covering the whole head, of the kind used in later Roman theatre. From the object the sense moved to the part played, then to a character or assumed role, and only later to a personage and a human being. English still keeps a faint theatrical echo in talk of appearing in the person of someone. A later reborrowing, persona, makes the mask and role senses explicit again.
How Latin acquired persōna is less settled. One popular account, already current in antiquity, tied the noun to the verb personare, to sound through: the actor’s voice passing through the mouth opening of the mask and perhaps coming out louder. Nineteenth-century dictionaries still repeated that story. Two problems stand in the way. Latin persōna has a long ō, while the matching vowel in personare is short, and the verb is attested later than the noun. A long-standing alternative, favoured by several modern dictionaries, is an Etruscan loan. In the Tomb of the Augurs at Tarquinia, a masked figure is labelled phersu. Scholars often take that word as related to a mask or a masked performer, and some reconstruct an Etruscan form along the lines of phersuna, something belonging to that figure, as the source of Latin persōna. The evidence is thin. The Etruscan word is rare, and it is not even certain whether the inscription names the man, the mask, or a role. A Greek link through prósōpon, face or mask, has also been proposed. Michiel de Vaan’s etymological dictionary of Latin simply has no entry. The theatrical meaning in Latin is secure; the step before Latin is not.
There is no useful prefix-and-root analysis inside the English word itself. Folk accounts that split Latin per (through) and sonus (sound) are the same old personare story in another dress. Treat persōna as a single borrowed unit, not as an English compound.
Trinity, body, corporation, grammar
Once English had the noun, further senses arrived in a fairly clear order. By the mid-thirteenth century it could name one of the three Persons of the Trinity, a Church Latin use of the classical word. Late in the fourteenth century it could mean the living body or outward appearance, the sense still heard in in person, recorded from the 1560s as bodily presence. Grammar took it in the 1510s for the relation of a subject to a verb: first, second, and third person.
Law made a more lasting stretch. In the fifteenth century, person could mean a corporate body with rights and duties before the law, shortened from earlier phrases such as person aggregate (around 1400) and person corporate (mid-fifteenth century). That is why a company can be a person on paper without being a human. The mask metaphor is almost too neat here, a legal role standing in for a group, but the legal sense grew from medieval usage rather than from a modern pun.
The same Latin noun took a second path into English as parson, a parish priest, from Anglo-French and Old French persone in that clerical sense, already used as a surname in the late twelfth century. Person and parson are doublets: two English words from one Latin source, split by sound change and by occupation.
In the late twentieth century the element -person was pressed into compounds such as chairperson, attested by 1971, to avoid a default -man. That is a modern social use of an old loan, not a new etymology.
The surviving mask
French personne, Italian persona, and English person all still name a human, but English also kept the older theatrical word by borrowing it again as persona. The everyday noun and the specialist doublet sit side by side: one for the individual, one for the role or social face. Whether the Etruscan label in a Tarquinia tomb is the true ancestor remains an open question. The most concrete survival is not the physical mask but the legal and grammatical senses, which still treat a person as a standing that language and law can assign.