Word.ws English Dictionary

common place

common place is the obsolete form of commonplace.

Meaning of commonplace

Noun

commonplace (countable and uncountable, plural commonplaces)

  1. A platitude or cliché.
    • Finally he began to mutter some commonplaces which meant nothing particularly.1899, Stephen Crane, chapter 17, in Active Service
  2. Something that is ordinary; something commonly done or occurring.
    • It is odd how easily the common-places of morality or of sentiment glide off in conversation. Well, they are "exceedingly helpful," and so Lord Avonleigh found them.1834, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], chapter XVII, in Francesca Carrara. […], volume III, London: Richard Bentley, […], (successor to Henry Colburn), →OCLC, page 137
  3. A memorandum; something to be frequently consulted or referred to.
    • Whatever, in my reading, occurs concerning this our fellow creature, I do never fail to set it down by way of common-place.1710, Jonathan Swift, A Discourse concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit
  4. A commonplace book.

See all 8 meanings of commonplace

Forms of common place

pluralcommon places

Questions about common place

What is common place the obsolete form of?
Common place is the obsolete form of commonplace.

Words near common place in the dictionary

  1. common people
  2. common person
  3. common pheasant
  4. common pheasants
  5. common pillbug
  6. common place
  7. common places
  8. common plum
  9. common plums
  10. common pochard
  11. common pochards

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: common place (page history and authors); commonplace (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: “common place.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/common_place. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.