Populace

How to spell populace

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce populace

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does populace mean?

1. nounThe ordinary people who make up the population of a place.

Populace in a sentence

• The new tax angered much of the local populace.

• The mayor promised to keep the populace informed about the road closures.

Where does populace come from?

Language of origin: French

This word travelled into English in the early 1600s from the French populace, which the French had in turn borrowed from the Italian popolaccio. The Italian word was built on popolo, meaning 'people', plus the rather scornful suffix -accio, so it originally carried a dismissive flavour close to 'the rabble' or 'the common mob'. Both popolo and the French peuple trace back to the Latin populus, which simply meant 'the people' as a whole community and also gave English a whole family of relatives such as 'popular', 'population', and 'public'. Over time populace lost most of its sneering edge and settled into its modern, neutral sense of the general body of ordinary citizens. The spelling trap is its near-twin 'populous', an adjective meaning densely inhabited; both ride on the same populus root, which is exactly why the noun ending -ace and the adjective ending -ous are so easy to swap by mistake.

How the word is built

• popul- (from Latin populus: people)
• -ace (noun suffix, from Italian -accio)

Words that sound like populace

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• populous: Having a large number of inhabitants; densely populated.