manned

adjective

ˈmand 

see usage paragraph below

: carrying, staffed, or performed by one or more people

a manned security booth

manned spaceflight

a manned mission

Usage of Manned and Unmanned

While manned and unmanned are still commonly used in news sources to describe spaceflights with and without human crews, respectively, NASA has since the early 21st century used and prescribed non-gender-specific terms, preferring such descriptors as human, piloted, and crewed for the former, and unpiloted and uncrewed for the latter.

Examples of manned in a Sentence

a manned mission to the moon

Recent Examples on the Web

To guard against manned and unmanned surface vessels that could pose threats, Stavridis said, commanders could position Navy SEALs or other armed personnel in small, high-speed boats, with Israeli security forces providing protection on land. —Dan Lamothe, Washington Post, 31 Mar. 2024

The technology could speed up a manned trip to Mars from the current seven-month minimum to as few as 45 days. —Tim Newcomb, Popular Mechanics, 30 Aug. 2023

That mission marked the first rendezvous of two manned spacecraft, the kind of maneuver that had to be perfected for a lunar module to descend to the moon from a command module, which remained in orbit, and then link up with it for the trip home. —Richard Goldstein, New York Times, 18 Mar. 2024

From 1873 until the 1960s, East Brother Island was home to a manned lighthouse, using its beacon and horn to guide ships through the often-foggy strait that connects San Francisco Bay to San Pablo Bay. —Tribune News Service, The Mercury News, 14 Feb. 2024

The robotic vehicles are meant to supplement the Navy’s manned warships, rather than replace them. —Gary Robbins, San Diego Union-Tribune, 14 Feb. 2024

While the court then found that manned aircraft surveilling backyards did not violate the Fourth Amendment, the differences with today’s drones are significant, said Hannah Zhao, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a watchdog group that filed a brief in the Michigan case. —Carey L. Biron, The Christian Science Monitor, 12 Feb. 2024

However, just a few weeks later, the Wright brothers made a manned flight. —Nadezhda Kosareva, Forbes, 22 Feb. 2024

The strikes were launched from air, surface and subsurface platforms and included Tomahawk land attack missiles as well as manned aircraft from the U.S.S. Eisenhower, the official said. —Eleanor Watson, CBS News, 22 Jan. 2024

Word History

First Known Use

1583, in the meaning defined above

Kids Definition

manned

adjective

ˈmand 

: carrying or performed by a person

manned spaceflight