Word.ws English Dictionary

public-school

public-school is the attributive form of public school.

public-school is the alternative form of public school.

Meaning of public school

Noun

public school (plural public schools)

  1. (India, Ireland, UK) Certain private schools, particularly (initially) any grammar school operated apart from the personal lands of its students or (from the 19th century) the feepaying secondary schools which developed from or were modelled upon them; a British boarding school.
    • All such School-masters as have charge of Children and do instruct them either in Publick Schools, or Private Houses.1580 June 18, Letters of the Privy Council in John Strype's History of Edmund Grindal (1710), ii.xi.254
  2. (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Philippines, South Africa, US) A publicly funded and administered school; (UK, Ireland) such schools in the context of other countries.
    • The Court voted for the erecting a Publick Schooll or Colledge in Cambridge.1636, Harvard College Records, published 1925, I.171
  3. (obsolete) A college or university.
    • Thither [to Douai] he went, where after a yeres great diligence and many excercises done booth in house and publike scholes, he proceded bachilier of diuinitie [bachelor of divinity].1582, W. Allen, Briefe Hist. Glorious Martyrdom, sig. d3

Forms of public-school

pluralpublic-schools

Questions about public-school

What is public-school the attributive form of?
Public-school is the attributive form of public school.

Words near public-school in the dictionary

  1. public-key cryptography
  2. public-minded
  3. public-private partnership
  4. public-private partnerships
  5. public-relations
  6. public-school
  7. public-schools
  8. public-sector
  9. public-service announcement
  10. public-service announcements
  11. public-spirited

Source and license

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