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COMMON MAN
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Dictionary entry overview: What does common man mean?
• COMMON MAN (noun)
The noun COMMON MAN has 1 sense:
1. a person who holds no title
Familiarity information: COMMON MAN used as a noun is very rare.
Dictionary entry details
Sense 1
Meaning:
A person who holds no title
Classified under:
Nouns denoting people
Synonyms:
common man; common person; commoner
Hypernyms ("common man" is a kind of...):
individual; mortal; person; somebody; someone; soul (a human being)
Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "common man"):
bourgeois; burgher (a member of the middle class)
cipher; cypher; nobody; nonentity (a person of no influence)
everyman (the ordinary person)
Joe Bloggs; Joe Blow; John Doe; man in the street (a hypothetical average man)
layman; layperson; secular (someone who is not a clergyman or a professional person)
pleb; plebeian (one of the common people)
prole; proletarian; worker (a member of the working class (not necessarily employed))
rustic (an unsophisticated country person)
Context examples
“He's no common man, Barbecue,” said the coxswain to me.
(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)
Not a bit of it, my dear; I'm just a common man.
(The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum)
There ain't a gent'lman in all the land—nor yet sailing upon all the sea—that can love his lady more than I love her, though there's many a common man—would say better—what he meant.
(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)
The Spanish slinger, seeing the youth lie slain, and judging from his dress that he was no common man, rushed forward to plunder him, knowing well that the bowmen above him had expended their last shaft.
(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
If it be so, then was he no common man; for in that time, and for centuries after, he was spoken of as the cleverest and the most cunning, as well as the bravest of the sons of the 'land beyond the forest.'
(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)
“My friend Mr. Dick,” replied my aunt proudly, “is not a common man.”
(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)
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