nonperson

From non- +‎ person.

• IPA^(key): /ˈnɒnpɜː(ɹ)sən/

nonperson (plural nonpersons or nonpeople)

1. Not a real person; a subhuman.
   • 1989, Michael C. Kearl, Endings: A Sociology of Death and Dying, page 146:

     As all lives must end, do you prefer to die as a nonperson, forgotten in a nursing home and totally stripped of dignity and independence?

   • 1994, Lisa J. McIntyre, Law in the Sociological Enterprise, page 92:

     Arguably, what is so hateful about a hate crime is that it is an attempt by some individual or group to treat a Person as a Nonperson.

   • 1998, John E. Tropman, Does America Hate the Poor?, page 6:

     How does hate work? [...] One answer is that the poor person (or the Jew, or the Asian, or the Native American, or whoever) becomes, intellectually, linguistically, and emotionally, a "lessperson," and then a nonperson.

2. Something other than a person; an object.
   • 1995, Roger K. R. Thompson, “Natural and Relational Concepts in Animals”, in Comparative Approaches to Cognitive Science, page 179:

     Taken together, all the results suggested that discrimination of person from nonperson slides was not controlled by an obvious single stimulus feature.

   • 2001, Eric T. Olson, “A Compound of Two Substances”, in Soul, Body, and Survival, page 77:

     No nonperson is psychologically indistinguishable from you.

   • 2002, Ritva Laury, “Interaction, grounding, and third-person referential forms”, in Frank Brisard, editor, Grounding: The Epistemic Footing of Deixis and Reference, page 85:

     For example, Benveniste [...] discusses the connection of first- and second-person pronouns with the speech situation, and even goes as far as to claim that the third person is a nonperson, since the referents of third-person pronouns are not speech-act participants.

• subhuman

• unperson