Word.ws English Dictionary

public goods

public goods is the plural of public good.

Meaning of public good

Noun

public good (countable and uncountable, plural public goods)

  1. (uncountable) The general welfare of the people; the best interests of the community.
  2. (broadly, countable) A resource, service, or other provision which contributes to the general welfare of the people.
    • I heartily agree with Deresiewicz that high-quality postsecondary education is a public good which should be accessible to any citizen who can profit from it.2014 September 5, Steven Pinker, “The Trouble With Harvard”, in The New Republic, archived from the original on 08 Feb 2015
  3. (countable) A good that is non-rivalrous and non-excludable.

Questions about public goods

What is public goods the plural of?
Public goods is the plural of public good.

Words near public goods in the dictionary

  1. public finance
  2. Public Friend
  3. Public Friends
  4. public funds
  5. public good
  6. public goods
  7. public health
  8. public health funeral
  9. public health funerals
  10. Public Health Service
  11. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps

Source and license

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