My party made a new word to describe intelligent life

I've been running this campaign for coming up on three years now. The primary setting is a very large, cosmopolitan city that has a great mix of the fantastical races of DnD. As we were playing the game, I would often run into hiccups of generally describing the population with Human specific terms out of habit, but I found the alternatives clumsy or distasteful. Intelligent life, intelligents, sentients, or something akin to 'all the races' weren't cutting for me and my faster passed narrative style. It also struck me as odd that in such a mixed society, there wasn't already a quick and easy term.

My players and I were hanging out after a session and I just asked them what they thought would be a good alternative and we started an impromptu brainstorming session. What we settled on as a quick, memorable word to use to describe any form of sentient life, is scien with the plural sciens. Pronounced "SKEE-en", it is the first part of the Latin word scientia, meaning knowledge. Scien can be used as a substitute for anytime you would say human, people, humanity, humanist, etc...

The only issue I've run into with it, is that it can be applied very broadly in a typical DnD world. Is a mindflayer or dragon a scien? They certainly fit the bill of intelligent life, so maybe. We typically use it as a way to refer to the playable races of DnD, with the monstrous ones as honorable mentions. We've only tested it at our table, so I'd be interested to hear what Reddit thinks about it.

TL'DR: Scien is a quick and easy word you can use at your table to describe sentient or intelligent life. Allowing you to move away from human centric words in a high fantasy/cosmopolitan setting.