Word.ws English Dictionary

common weal

common weal is the alternative form of commonweal.

Meaning of commonweal

Noun

commonweal (plural commonweals)

  1. (archaic) The common good; public wellbeing or prosperity.
    • 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.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)
    Synonyms:
    res publica
  2. The body politic; republic.
    • […] 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...1531, Thomas Elyot, chapter I, in The Boke Named the Governour […], London: […] Tho[mas] Bertheleti, →OCLC

Forms of common weal

pluralcommon weals

Questions about common weal

What is common weal the alternative form of?
Common weal is the alternative form of commonweal.

Words near common weal in the dictionary

  1. common voles
  2. common walnut
  3. common walnuts
  4. common warthog
  5. common warthogs
  6. common weal
  7. common weals
  8. common wheat
  9. common whitebeam
  10. common whitebeams
  11. common whitefish

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: common weal (page history and authors); commonweal (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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