common

American  

[kom-uhn] / ˈkɒm ən /

adjective

commoner, commonest

1. belonging equally to, or shared alike by, two or more or all in question.

   common property;

   common interests.

   Antonyms:

   individual

2. pertaining or belonging equally to an entire community, nation, or culture; public.

   a common language or history;

   a common water-supply system.

3. joint; united.

   a common defense.

4. widespread; general; universal.

   common knowledge.

   Synonyms:

   accepted, popular, prevalent

5. of frequent occurrence; usual; familiar.

   a common event;

   a common mistake.

   Synonyms:

   everyday, habitual, customary

   Antonyms:

   unusual

6. hackneyed; trite.

7. of mediocre or inferior quality; mean; low.

   a rough-textured suit of the most common fabric.

8. coarse; vulgar.

   common manners.

9. lacking rank, station, distinction, etc.; unexceptional; ordinary: common people; a common thief.

   a common soldier;

   common people;

   the common man;

   a common thief.

10. Dialect. friendly; sociable; unaffected.

11. Anatomy. forming or formed by two or more parts or branches.

    the common carotid arteries.

12. Prosody. (of a syllable) able to be considered as either long or short.

13. Grammar.

    1. not belonging to an inflectional paradigm; fulfilling different functions that in some languages require different inflected forms.

       English nouns are in the common case whether used as subject or object.

    2. constituting one of two genders of a language, especially a gender comprising nouns that were formerly masculine or feminine.

       Swedish nouns are either common or neuter.

    3. noting a word that may refer to either a male or a female.

       French élève has common gender. English lacks a common gender pronoun in the third person singular.

    4. (of a noun) belonging to the common gender.

14. Mathematics. bearing a similar relation to two or more entities.

15. of, relating to, or being common stock.

    common shares.

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noun

1. Chiefly New England. Often commons. a tract of land owned or used jointly by the residents of a community, usually a central square or park in a city or town.

2. Law. the right or liberty, in common with other persons, to take profit from the land or waters of another, as by pasturing animals on another's land commonofpasturage or fishing in another's waters commonofpiscary.

3. (used with a singular or plural verb) commons,

   1. the commonalty; the nonruling class.

   2. the body of people not of noble birth or not ennobled, as represented in England by the House of Commons.

   3. Commons, the representatives of this body.

   4. Commons, the House of Commons.

4. commons,

   1. (used with a singular verb) a large dining room, especially at a university or college.

   2. (usually used with a plural verb) food provided in such a dining room.

   3. (usually used with a plural verb) food or provisions for any group.

5. Ecclesiastical. Sometimes Commons

   1. an office or form of service used on a festival of a particular kind.

   2. the ordinary of the Mass, especially those parts sung by the choir.

   3. the part of the missal and breviary containing Masses and offices of those saints assigned to them.

6. Obsolete.

   1. the community or public.

   2. the common people.

idioms

1. in common, in joint possession or use; shared equally.

   They have a love of adventure in common.

common British  

/ ˈkɒmən /

adjective

1. belonging to or shared by two or more people

   common property

2. belonging to or shared by members of one or more nations or communities; public

   a common culture

3. of ordinary standard; average

   common decency

4. prevailing; widespread

   common opinion

5. widely known or frequently encountered; ordinary

   a common brand of soap

6. widely known and notorious

   a common nuisance

7. derogatory considered by the speaker to be low-class, vulgar, or coarse

   a common accent

8. (prenominal) having no special distinction, rank, or status

   the common man

9. maths

   1. having a specified relationship with a group of numbers or quantities

      common denominator

   2. (of a tangent) tangential to two or more circles

10. prosody (of a syllable) able to be long or short, or (in nonquantitative verse) stressed or unstressed

11. grammar (in certain languages) denoting or belonging to a gender of nouns, esp one that includes both masculine and feminine referents

    Latin sacerdos is common

12. anatomy

    1. having branches

       the common carotid artery

    2. serving more than one function

       the common bile duct

13. Christianity of or relating to the common of the Mass or divine office

14. informal ordinary; unexceptional

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noun

1. (sometimes plural) a tract of open public land, esp one now used as a recreation area

2. law the right to go onto someone else's property and remove natural products, as by pasturing cattle or fishing (esp in the phrase right of common )

3. Christianity

   1. a form of the proper of the Mass used on festivals that have no special proper of their own

   2. the ordinary of the Mass

4. archaic the ordinary people; the public, esp those undistinguished by rank or title

5. mutually held or used with another or others

common More Idioms  

More idioms and phrases containing common

• in common

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Synonym Usage

See general. Common, vulgar, ordinary refer, often with derogatory connotations of cheapness or inferiority, to what is usual or most often experienced. Common applies to what is accustomed, usually experienced, or inferior, to the opposite of what is exclusive or aristocratic: The park is used by the common people. Vulgar properly means belonging to the people, or characteristic of common people; it connotes low taste, coarseness, or ill breeding: the vulgar view of things; vulgar in manners and speech. Ordinary refers to what is to be expected in the usual order of things; it means average or below average: That is a high price for something of such ordinary quality.

Other Word Forms

• commonness
  noun
• overcommonness
  noun
• overcommon
  adjective
• quasi-common
  adjective
• overcommonly
  adverb
• quasi-commonly
  adverb

Etymology

Origin of common

First recorded in 1250–1300; Middle English comun, from Anglo-French, Old French, from Latin commūnis “common,” presumably originally “sharing common duties,” akin to mūnia “duties of an office,” mūnus “task, duty, gift,” from an unattested base moin-, cognate with mean ²; cf. com-, immune

Explanation

When something's common, it's usual, or it happens frequently. It's more common than you might think for little kids to be terrified of clowns. Things that are common happen all the time — they're ordinary. It's common for people to put ketchup on their French fries, and a pigeon is an extremely common type of bird to see in a city. Common can also refer to something that's shared by a group, like a region's common culture. In fact, a green space in the center of a town is sometimes called a common, maybe because it's shared by everyone in the town.

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

common commoner commonest

France has been battered by three heatwaves since May as part of increasingly common extreme weather episodes linked to climate change, causing excess deaths, drying up rivers and fuelling wildfires.

From Barron's ● Jul. 23, 2026

Dengue fever, which is spread to humans through mosquitoes, is common in tropical climates.

From BBC ● Jul. 23, 2026

Liu’s Dominique sometimes loses patience and cuts through the languor with some common sense.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 23, 2026

By common understanding, uranium must be enriched to a level of 20 percent purity to be deemed “highly enriched” and 90 percent to be “weapons-grade.”

From Slate ● Jul. 23, 2026

It was an experience common to most childhoods, though new to Penelope—that of drifting off to sleep as her parents spoke quietly in another room, trying not to be overheard.

From "The Long-Lost Home" by Maryrose Wood

He’s been called a thief, a benefactor, a commoner, a lord, a killer and a hero.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 18, 2026

One compares her to baseball star Shohei Ohtani, another praises her as a "commoner prime minister".

From Barron's ● Feb. 4, 2026

LONDON—It was supposed to be the moment a shamed prince was reduced to humble commoner.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 7, 2025

Amos, as Cleo McDowell, was his opposite: the slightly bumbling if protective dad of Shari Headley’s Lisa, the commoner Akeem wooed to his family’s great dismay.

From Salon ● Oct. 1, 2024

The effect of such an education was that he had grown up without any of the useful accomplishments for living—without malice, vanity, suspicion, cruelty, and the commoner forms of selfishness.

From "The Once and Future King" by T. H. White

And the blackbird remains one of the commonest garden birds with numbers holding steady in many parts of the country, especially in rural areas, and in the north.

From BBC ● May 14, 2025

So-called hyperemesis gravidarum is the commonest cause of admission to hospital of women in the first three months of pregnancy.

From Science Daily ● Dec. 13, 2023

“When someone asks what new or exciting birds I have seen on my morning walk, I smile and answer with delight as I name the commonest birds,” she writes.

From Seattle Times ● Dec. 29, 2022

Rampant, unchecked militarism, as historian Arnold Toynbee noted, "has been by far the commonest cause of the breakdown of civilizations."

From Salon ● Aug. 31, 2022

But lesser failures of coherence are among the commonest flaws in writing.

From "The Sense of Style" by Steven Pinker

Related Words

• accepted
• commonplace
• everyday
• familiar
• frequent
• natural
• prevailing
• prevalent
• routine
• simple
• trivial
• typical
• universal