Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The state or fact of being common; frequent occurrence; frequency.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun State or quality of being common or usual.
  • noun Triteness; meanness.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The quality of being common.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the quality of lacking taste and refinement
  • noun ordinariness as a consequence of being frequent and commonplace
  • noun the state of being that is commonly observed
  • noun sharing of common attributes

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Nothing could have been more commonplace than the whole incident, but the commonness was the beauty of it.

    Change in the Village George Sturt 1895

  • There was something common about him -- not like the labouring men, but a kind of town commonness, which is twenty times worse to my thinking; and if I didn't like him before, you may guess I didn't waste much love on him when I see poor Ellen's looks.

    In Homespun 1891

  • In the rest of practical life he walked by hereditary habit; half from that personal pride and unreflecting egoism which I have already called commonness, and half from that naivete which belonged to preoccupation with favorite ideas.

    Middlemarch 1871

  • In the rest of practical life he walked by hereditary habit; half from that personal pride and unreflecting egoism which I have already called commonness, and half from that naivete which belonged to preoccupation with favorite ideas.

    Middlemarch: a study of provincial life (1900) 1871

  • In the rest of practical life he walked by hereditary habit; half from that personal pride and unreflecting egoism which I have already called commonness, and half from that naivete which belonged to preoccupation with favorite ideas.

    Middlemarch George Eliot 1849

  • She produced the lunch box, and for once Bess was too ravenously hungry to protest at the "commonness" of it, and they set to at its delicious contents with a will.

    Nan Sherwood at Palm Beach Or Strange Adventures Among The Orange Groves Annie Roe Carr

  • Mr. Hartman, the father, was a wholesale grocer -- a business large enough to have brought wealth, but painfully tainted with "commonness".

    Love's Pilgrimage Upton Sinclair 1923

  • She was a little unhealthy thing, dark and sallow and sulky, with thin lips that showed a lack of temperament, and she had a stiffness and preciseness, like a Board School teacher -- just that touch of "commonness" which Lena relied on to put him off.

    The Best British Short Stories of 1922 Various 1915

  • She was a little unhealthy thing, dark and sallow and sulky, with thin lips that showed a lack of temperament, and she had a stiffness and preciseness, like a Board School teacher -- just that touch of "commonness" which Lena relied on to put him off.

    The Best British Short Stories of 1922 John Cournos 1915

  • The ceremonial inferiority or uncleanness in consumable goods due to "commonness," or in other words to their slight cost of production, has been taken very seriously by many persons.

    The theory of the leisure class; an economic study of institutions 1899

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