Commonwealth

How to spell commonwealth

12 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce commonwealth

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does commonwealth mean?

1. nounAn independent state or community organised for the common good of its people.

Commonwealth in a sentence

• The founders dreamed of building a fair and prosperous commonwealth.

• Taxes collected across the commonwealth funded the new road network.

Where does commonwealth come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grew out of the Middle English phrase 'common weal', where 'weal' meant well-being, welfare, or prosperity, and so it literally described the shared good or general welfare of a whole people. The element 'wealth' here is older than its modern money-centred sense; it was once an abstract noun for the state of being well, formed from 'weal' plus the suffix that also gives us 'health'. By the fifteenth century the two words had fused into 'commonwealth', meaning a body of people organised for the common good, and from there it came to mean the state or political community itself. Later it was applied to republics, to certain American states such as Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, and to the association of nations once linked to the British Empire. The spelling trap is that there is no money in it: writers expect 'wealth' to feel like riches, but the word is really about shared welfare, and it is spelled as a single solid compound with no space and no hyphen.

How the word is built

• common (shared, belonging to all)
• wealth (well-being, prosperity; originally from 'weal')