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What is "man-hour"

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
man-hour
noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ By now, many hundreds of man-hours had been put into the Packard Merlin and much had still to be done.
▪ Hundreds of man-hours had gone into its compilation - all for nothing.
▪ In the late 1960's, a Volkswagen car took 19 man-hours to build, thanks largely to semi-automatic aids.
▪ It took 18,000 man-hours to repair a complete Whitley.
▪ Last year, the Police Department spent about 70 man-hours responding to alarm calls.
▪ Surrounding them in vaulted stone and glass, wood and gorgeous cloth, were millions of man-hours of work.
▪ The cost is more than made up for by the fact that virtually no man-hours are lost through strike action.
▪ They estimate it will take them 20,000 man-hours to get the aircraft flying and ready for the round-the-world trip.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
man-hour

man hour \man hour\, man-hour \man-hour\n. The quantity of work which one person can perform in one hour; -- often an estimate made for the purpose of deciding whether to undertake a project, and sometimes used in accounting; as, it will take a hundred man-hours to write the program.

Wiktionary
man-hour

n. The amount of work that can be done by one person in an hour.

Wikipedia
Man-hour

A man-hour is the amount of work performed by the average worker in one hour. It is used in written "estimates" for estimation of the total amount of uninterrupted labour required to perform a task. For example, researching and writing a college paper might require twenty man-hours. Preparing a family banquet from scratch might require ten man-hours.

Man-hours do not take account of the breaks that people generally require from work, e.g. for rest, eating, and other bodily functions. They only count pure labour. Managers count the man-hours and add break time to estimate the amount of time a task will actually take to complete. Thus, while one college course's written paper might require twenty man-hours to carry out, it almost certainly will not get done in twenty consecutive hours. Its progress will be interrupted by work for other courses, meals, sleep, and other distractions.

Usage examples of "man-hour".

The Bessemer converter to make cast iron into steel took many thousands of man-hours, as did the rolling mill that made sheetmetal and the stamping line that pressed out helmets, breast plates, shoulder cops, and the other twenty-seven pieces it took to cover a man.

You could see that the MEM was an experimental ship: the product of handcrafting, of thousands of man-hours of patient labor, and based on conservative designs, stuff that had worked before.

Bachem hazarded a design that could be produced in under 1,000 man-hours per copy, a manned, disposable flying shotgun featuring rocket ascent and parachute recovery.

Jim Whitney was a victim to the prevailing delusion of his time -that to build a successful rocket ship all you had to do was to pour enough money and man-hours into it.

You'd add top-heaviness to the administrative sector, inject a battalion-worth of unnecessary political maneuvering and infighting, and generally use up man-hours for no net gain.