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/kˈɑmənplˌeɪs/ Listen

Commonplace

adjective

1.

Completely ordinary and unremarkable. "Commonplace everyday activities"

2.

Not challenging; dull and lacking excitement. Synonyms: humdrum, prosaic, unglamorous, unglamourous.

3.

Repeated too often; overfamiliar through overuse. Synonyms: banal, hackneyed, old-hat, shopworn, stock, threadbare, timeworn, tired, trite, well-worn. "His remarks were trite and commonplace" , "Hackneyed phrases" , "A stock answer" , "Repeating threadbare jokes" , "Parroting some timeworn axiom" , "The trite metaphor 'hard as nails'"

noun

1.

A trite or obvious remark. Synonyms: banality, bromide, cliche, platitude.

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WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University

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"Commonplace" Quotes from Famous Books

... a burden of gratitude." The saying is a little too much like Rochefoucauld, and too true to be pleasant; but it was one of those keen remarks which Johnson appreciated because they prick a bubble of commonplace moralizing without demanding too literal an acceptation. He went home to sup with Reynolds and became his intimate friend. On another occasion, Johnson was offended by two ladies of rank at the same house, and by way of taking down their pride, asked Reynolds in a loud ...

— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen

... horns for sale trailing along the platform, and, not ten yards from the track, a cinnamon bear and a young grizzly standing up with extended arms in their pens and begging for food. It was strange beyond anything that this bald telling can suggest—opening a door into a new world. The only commonplace thing about the spot was its name—Medicine Hat, which struck me instantly as the only possible name such a town could carry. This is that place which later became a town; but I had seen it three years before when it was even smaller and was ...

— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling

... infernal regions, an episode evidently imitated by Virgil from his Grecian master, into a minute description of the initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries. A notion so perfectly new was at least worth a commonplace truth. Was it not delightful to have so many particulars detailed of a secret transaction, which even its contemporaries of two thousand years ago did not presume to know anything about? Father Hardouin seems to have opened the way for Warburton, since he had discovered that the whole AEneid ...

— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... was far better than he. Words of humility and apology leaped once more to the end of his tongue, but they did not pass his lips. He could not say them. His stubborn pride still controlled and he rambled on with commonplace and ...

— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler

... quietly, without a smile, to assure herself that it was he and no one else. She said nothing, and he sat down upon the other side of the fireplace. There was an air of embarrassment about their meetings, until one or the other had made some remark which led to a commonplace conversation. On the present occasion neither seemed inclined to be the first speaker and for some minutes they sat opposite to each other in silence. Giovanni glanced at his wife from time to time, and once she turned her head and met his eyes. ...

— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford

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