populace

I

(New American Roget's College Thesaurus)

Common people

Nouns

1. populace; the people, multitude, crowd, masses; bourgeoisie; commonalty; democracy; common people, lower classes, hoi polloi, rank and file, the ruck, folk, proletariat, plebs, great unwashed, silent majority; the common touch. See humanity, vulgarity, servant.

2. (crowd) mob, rabble, rout, hoi polloi, the many-headed monster; horde, canaille; dregs; scum of society or the earth; tag, rag and bobtail, riffraff; small fry.

3. (common man) commoner, man in the street, the average man, the little man, one of the people, democrat, plebeian, proletarian, republican, bourgeois; Mrs. Grundy, Philistine, Babbitt; Joe Blow, Joe Doakes, John or Jane Doe, John or Jane Q. Public.

4. (country person) peasant, countryman, boor, churl, lout, villein, curmudgeon; serf; dockwalloper, longshoreman, navvy; swain, clown, clod, clodhopper; hobnail, yokel, bumpkin; plowman, rustic, tiller of the soil; blue-collar man, woman, or worker; hewers of wood and drawers of water. Informal, hayseed, country mouse. Slang, hick, jay, rube.

5. (city person) city dweller. Informal, town mouse.

6. (person of the street) beggar, mudlark, sans culotte, raff, tatterdemalion, hobbledehoy, caitiff, ragamuffin, pariah; guttersnipe, urchin, street urchin or arab; tramp, hobo, knight of the road, vagabond, vagrant, bum, weary Willie. Slang, bindle stiff.

Adjectives — popular; plebeian, proletarian, common, democratic; homely, homespun; vulgar, lowborn, ignoble, illbred, baseborn, earthy; unknown to fame, obscure, untitled; rustic, countrified, provincial; loutish, boorish, clownish, churlish; barbarous, barbarian, barbaric.

Phrases — you can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy; who builds upon the people, builds upon sand.

Quotations — In the common people there is no wisdom, no penetration, no power of judgment (Cicero), All the world over, I will back the masses against the classes (William Gladstone), There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself (William Hazlitt), The people are a many-headed beast (Horace), The people are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty (Thomas Jefferson), The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history (Mao Zedung).

Antonyms, see nobility.

II

(Roget's IV) n.

Syn. masses, commonality, multitude; see man 1 , people 3 .

III

(Roget's Thesaurus II) noun The common people: common (used in plural), commonality, commonalty, commoner (used in plural), crowd, hoi polloi, mass (used in plural), mob, pleb (used in plural), plebeian (used in plural), public, ruck1, third estate. See OVER.