Hello, you have come here looking for the meaning of the word
commonweal. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word
commonweal, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say
commonweal in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word
commonweal you have here. The definition of the word
commonweal will help you to be more precise and correct when speaking or writing your texts. Knowing the definition of
commonweal, as well as those of other words, enriches your vocabulary and provides you with more and better linguistic resources.
English
Alternative forms
Etymology
common (“public”) + weal (“well-being”). From c. 1450, common wele was used as a compound.
Rollison (2017) thinks that comun and wele may already have been used in collocation in 14th-century Middle English.
By the 1520s used by some authors as the equivalent of res publica (republic), alongside commonwealth from about the same time.
Pronunciation
Noun
commonweal (plural commonweals)
- (obsolete or archaic) The common good; public wellbeing or prosperity
1843 April, Thomas Carlyle, “ch. XIII, In Parliament”, in Past and Present, American edition, Boston, Mass.: Charles C[offin] Little and James Brown, published 1843, →OCLC, book II (The Ancient Monk):He had to judge the people as justice Errant […]; to equip his milites, send them duly in war-time to the King; — strive every way that the Commonweal, in his quarter of it, take no damage.
1995 May 21, Steven Levy, “The Unabomber and David Gelernter”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:He yearns for the days when people, for reasons of the commonweal, did what they were told.
- The body politic; republic
1531, Thomas Elyot, chapter I, in Ernest Rhys, editor, The Boke Named the Governour (Everyman’s Library), London: J[oseph] M[alaby] Dent & Co; New York, N.Y.: E[dward] P[ayson] Dutton & Co, published , →OCLC:[...] hit semeth that men haue ben longe abused in calling Rempublica a commune weale. And they which do suppose it so to be called for that, that euery thinge shulde be to all men in commune without discrepance of any astate or condition, be ther to moued more by sensualite, than by any good reason or inclination to humanite. [...] And consequently there may appere lyke deuersitie to be englisshe, betwene a publike weale & a commune weale, as shulde be in latin betwene Res publica and Res plebeia.
Derived terms
References
- David Rollison, A Commonwealth of the People: Popular Politics and England's Long Social Revolution, 1066-1649, Cambridge University Press, (2010), p. 13.
- David Rollison in: Fitter (ed.), Shakespeare and the Politics of Commoners: Digesting the New Social History, Oxford University Press, (2017), p. 64.