Word.ws English Dictionary

commess

commess noun: good-natured trouble; mischief; hanky-panky or high jinks.

Noun

commess (uncountable)

  1. (Caribbean) Good-natured trouble; mischief; hanky-panky or high jinks.
    • Romance, tragedy, a simply sweet love story, shame and scandal in the family, bacchanal, commess and sex at its best have been depicted in thousands of romance novels for generations.2012 September 14, Bobie-lee Dixon, “Romance writing alive and well in T&T”, in Trinidad Guardian
    • "The alternative would have been to let the country believe that there were all kinds of shady, nefarious bits of commess going on inside here," he said.2012 April 10, “ASP Maharaj is new SSA director”, in Trinidad & Tobago Express
  2. (Caribbean) Gossip about local scandals.
    • Even the recognition that commess is a pervasive feature of village life does not affect the judgment that it is alien to respectability, to mainstream morality and behavioral propriety. Again villagers are faced with a contradiction between needing to act out their disapproval of deviant sexual...1987, Hymie Rubenstein, Coping with poverty: adaptive strategies in a Caribbean village
    • Not only is commess judged in this way, but it is related in the minds of Vincentians with such other traditional devices as joking ('ragging', 'making mock'), arguing ('making boderation', 'giving vextation') and ceremonial performances of a more ritualised sort. In other words, Vincentians seem...2003, Philip Auslander, Performance: Media and technology, →ISBN, page 62

Examples of commess in a sentence

  • With an entire house to ourselves, you can only imagine the commess (creative trouble) we got into.2016 September 23, “Recipe – The Ultimate Island Spicy Fried Chicken”, in The St. Kitts-Nevis Observer:
  • Even the recognition that commess is a pervasive feature of village life does not affect the judgment that it is alien to respectability, to mainstream morality and behavioral propriety.1987, Hymie Rubenstein, Coping with poverty: adaptive strategies in a Caribbean village:
  • In other words, Vincentians seem to say that there is an 'art' in gossip just as there is in making a song or speech, or conducting an argument, and they judge the practice of commess accordingly.2003, Philip Auslander, Performance: Media and technology, →ISBN, page 62:
  • It was a year after de election, As they celebrating their success, There came de strangest allegation, T&T name calling in commess;2011 June 24, “Calypso queen updates Uncle Jack song”, in Trinidad Guardian:

Origin of commess

Late 20th c., via French Creole, from French commerce "business".

Questions about commess

What does commess mean?
Commess means good-natured trouble; mischief; hanky-panky or high jinks.
How do you use commess in a sentence?
With an entire house to ourselves, you can only imagine the commess (creative trouble) we got into.
What part of speech is commess?
Commess is a noun.

Words near commess in the dictionary

  1. commerges
  2. commerging
  3. Commerson
  4. Commerson's dolphin
  5. Commerson's dolphins
  6. commess
  7. commest
  8. commeth
  9. commic tern
  10. commic terns
  11. commie

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: commess (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “commess.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/commess. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.