Commoners

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A demographic group characterized by individuals without aristocratic privileges or titles who typically engage in labor or trades
2. A category of people within a society who are common and do not possess significant wealth or noble lineage, often forming the working class
3. People in a society who do not belong to the aristocracy or ruling classes and usually lack noble status

Etymology: The sense "people without nobility" grows out of a word for someone who shares something. In medieval England a "commoner" was a person who had common rights, such as the right to graze animals or gather wood on land held by a lord, and the word comes from the adjective "common" with the suffix "-er". The adjective itself goes back through Anglo-Norman "comun" to Latin "communis", meaning shared or belonging to all. The noun's sense shifted as the English social order changed. Once applied to any ordinary person holding shared rights on a manor, it came to name the whole population outside the nobility, so that "commoner" was set against "peer" and "noble" in the way the phrase "the commons" was used for the lower house of Parliament.

Synonyms: plebeians, citizens, populace, masses, folk

Antonyms: nobility, aristocrats, elite, upper class, privileged