A man who does physical work with his hands, especially building, fixing, or installing things — the man who comes to your house to mend the roof or put in a new boiler. Plural: workmen. In British English it is very common in the everyday sense of "the men doing work on the building": "The workmen start at seven, so I can't sleep." It is slightly old-fashioned now, and it carries an obvious problem: it says man. Because women do this work too, careful writers and all official documents now say worker, workers, or construction workers instead. Job adverts would never say workman today. It survives strongly in two places, though: in casual British speech about builders at your house, and in the fixed saying "a bad workman blames his tools" — meaning someone who is not good at something makes excuses about their equipment rather than admitting the fault is their own. You will also meet it frozen inside older words like workmanship. Note that the emphasis is on skilled or semi-skilled hands-on work; you would not call an office clerk a workman.