man in the street

1. 1.

   a hypothetical average man

   SynonymsJohn DoeJoe BlowJoe Bloggs

   Broadercommoner

Questions about man in the street

What does man in the street mean?

man in the street means "a hypothetical average man".

What is another word for man in the street?

Close synonyms include John Doe, Joe Blow, Joe Bloggs. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is man in the street a common word?

man in the street is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.