rmṯ

Noun

 * 1) human, human being, person
 * 2) someone, anyone
 * 3)  person in (someone’s) service, commissioner, agent (of someone)
 * 4)  member (of a group or organization)
 * 5)  people, humans
 * 6)  the people, the masses
 * 7)  household; housemates or relatives (of someone)
 * 8)  population, dwellers, inhabitants (of a particular place)
 * 9)  Egyptians in contrast to Libyans, Nubians, Asiatics, etc.

Usage notes
In the Old Kingdom, this word was consistently masculine and usually distinct in its singular and plural forms. By the Middle Kingdom, its final consonant changed to, with the consequence that the word changed genders to become feminine, and the singular was no longer typically distinguished in writing from its plural form. The written form from this time on occasionally included both the old and new consonants as. Before the beginning of the New Kingdom, syllable-final was lost throughout Egyptian, and in Late Egyptian the word returned to being masculine.

For many years Egyptologists distinguished this word as a masculine noun in its sense of ‘person’, etc., from a supposedly separate feminine collective term ; it is now clear the two words are one and the same, with the different written forms resulting from attempts to render the changing pronunciation (and gender) of the word as the final consonant first became and then was elided entirely.

Alternative forms
In the Old Kingdom, singular and plural forms are usually distinct, but seemingly plural forms are occasionally used as singulars, with most examples of this phenomenon found in the Pyramid Texts:

Inscriptions of the First Intermediate Period and Coffin Texts show a comprehensive collapse of the singular and plural written forms; from this point on they are no longer differentiated. By the start of the Middle Kingdom, the final consonant sound has changed from to, and occasional writings reflecting this sound change begin to appear from the 12th Dynasty onward:

By Late Egyptian, the final is no longer pronounced in most circumstances; in situations where it is retained, such as when the word has an attached suffix pronoun, an additional  or  is sometimes written at the end of the word to mark its retention.