Manna is a name born from a question: the Israelites saw it and asked man hu, 'what is it?'
מָן doesn't have a range of senses to sort through, the way words like chesed or ruach do. It names one thing only, the flaky substance that appeared on the ground each morning during Israel's years in the wilderness. What makes the word interesting is where it comes from. Exodus 16:15 says that when people first saw the stuff, they asked each other man hu — Hebrew for 'what is it?' — because they'd never seen anything like it before. The text then uses that very question as the food's name.
So מָן is, by the Bible's own account, a frozen question rather than a description. It doesn't tell you it's bread, or that it's sweet like wafers made with honey — those descriptions come later, in Exodus 16:31. The name just records everyone's confusion.
When the Israelites saw it, they asked one another, “What is it?” For they did not know what it was.
The name is coined here, when the Israelites ask man hu on first seeing it.
But now our appetite is gone; there is nothing to see but this manna!”
The people complain that manna is all they ever see, longing for Egypt's food instead.
He humbled you, and in your hunger He gave you manna to eat, which neither you nor your fathers had known, so that you might understand that man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.
Moses reinterprets the manna as a lesson: people don't live on bread alone.
Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, as it is written: ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’”
The crowd cites the manna story to test Jesus against Moses' miracle.
Nearly every English version — KJV, ESV, NIV — simply transliterates the word as 'manna' throughout, treating it as a proper noun for a food rather than a question turned into a name. That's a reasonable call, since English has no equivalent pun. But it means the wordplay in Exodus 16:15 usually survives only in a footnote, if at all, and readers meet 'manna' as a label rather than the puzzled question it started out as.
A popular but unreliable line of word-study traces 'manna' to an Egyptian word for a resin or gum, treating the name as evidence of what the substance chemically was. The text gives a simpler and more certain origin: it's a transliteration of the question 'what is it?' The name tells you about the Israelites' reaction, not about the food's composition.
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