Word.ws English Dictionary

John Q. Public

John Q. Public noun: a generic individual; some hypothetical average or ordinary citizen.

Noun

John Q. Public (uncountable)

  1. (idiomatic) A generic individual; some hypothetical average or ordinary citizen.
    • Near-synonyms: everyman; Tom, Dick or Harry; Joe Sixpack
    • Even careful safety precautions in the factory do not make it a good place for John Q. Public to wander unattended.

Synonyms of John Q. Public

2 more synonymsFewer synonyms

All synonyms of John Q. Public

Origin of John Q. Public

First use appears c. 1938. John Q. Public was the name of a character created by Vaughn Shoemaker, an editorial cartoonist for the Chicago Daily News from 1922 to 1952; Shoemaker introduced this character in 1922 but is believed to have added the "Q." sometime in the early 1930s.https://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/22/obituaries/vaughn-shoemaker-created-john-q-public.html Compare also John Doe.

Questions about John Q. Public

What does John Q. Public mean?
John Q. Public means a generic individual; some hypothetical average or ordinary citizen.
What part of speech is John Q. Public?
John Q. Public is a noun.

Words near John Q. Public in the dictionary

  1. John o' Groats
  2. John O'Gaunt
  3. John Orderly
  4. John Q. Law
  5. John Q. Laws
  6. John Q. Public
  7. John Radcliffe
  8. John Roscoe
  9. John Roscoes
  10. john school
  11. john schools

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: John Q. Public (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-John Q. Public.ogg.

Cite this entry: “John Q. Public.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/john_q._public. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.