Using sed to replace words

Question

Is it possible to use sed to replace words, but avoid replacing words that begin with the letters?

For example if I replace man with woman, but women becomes wowoman is it possible to skip woman with sed? Or would you pipe in sed again to remove wo from the beginning of the letters ?

sed -i 's/man/woman/g' /usr/share/dict/words | sed 's^wo//'g /usr/share/dict/words 

which doesn't seem to be working just add another wo on the start.

After reading more on piping grep into sed i tried the following command

sudo sed -i 's/man/woman | grep -v 'woman'/g' words1 

what i am looking to try out is replace all letter that have man with woman

Answer 1

Only replace "man" if it's a single word:

sed -i 's/\bman\b/woman/g' /usr/share/dict/words