public

1. 1.

   not private; open to or concerning the people as a whole

   “the public good”

   “public libraries”

   “public funds”

   “public parks”

   “a public scandal”

   “public gardens”

   “performers and members of royal families are public figures”

   Antonymsprivate

   Similarin the public eyenationalopensemipublicstate-supportedunexclusive
2. 2.

   affecting the people or community as a whole

   “community leaders”

   “community interests”

   “the public welfare”

   Similarcommon

Other forms of public

plural

publics·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about public

What does public mean?

public means "people in general considered as a whole". That is the primary sense; the word has 4 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in public?

public has 2 syllables: pub-lic. The stress falls on "pub". In IPA it is /ˈpʌblɪk/.

What is another word for public?

Close synonyms include populace, world. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

What is the opposite of public?

The recorded antonyms are private.

Is public a common word?

public is banded "Core" — among the few thousand words that carry most english. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.

What rhymes with public?

1 word rhymes with public. Rhymes are matched on the phonemes from the last stressed vowel onward, which is the definition a reader has in their head.