Noun

(en noun)

A platitude or .

* 1899 , , Active Service , ch. 17:

Finally he began to mutter some commonplaces which meant nothing particularly.

* 1910 , , His Hour , ch. 4:

And something angered Tamara in the way the Prince assisted in all this, out-commonplacing her friend in commonplaces with the suavest politeness.

Something that is ordinary.

* 1891 , , "A Case of Identity" in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes :

"My dear fellow," said Sherlock Holmes as we sat on either side of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, "life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence."

A memorandum; something to be frequently consulted or referred to.

* Jonathan Swift

Whatever, in my reading, occurs concerning this our fellow creature, I do never fail to set it down by way of commonplace .

A commonplace book.

Noun

(en noun)

A principle or example or measure used for comparison.

# A level of quality or attainment.

#*

, title=(The Celebrity), chapter=8 , passage=The humor of my proposition appealed more strongly to Miss Trevor than I had looked for, and from that time forward she became her old self again;

# Something used as a measure for comparative evaluations; a model.

#* (Jonathan Swift) (1667–1745)

the court, which used to be the standard of property and correctness of speech

#* (Edmund Burke) (1729-1797)

A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.

# A musical work of established popularity.

# A rule or set of rules or requirements which are widely agreed upon or imposed by government.

# The proportion of weights of fine metal and alloy established for coinage.

#* (John Arbuthnot) (1667-1735)

By the present standard of the coinage, sixty-two shillings is coined out of one pound weight of silver.

# A bottle of wine containing 0.750 liters of fluid.

A vertical pole with something at its apex.

# An object supported in an upright position, such as a .

#* {{quote-book, year=1963, author=(Margery Allingham)

, chapter=Foreword, title= The China Governess , passage=‘It was called the wickedest street in London and the entrance was just here. I imagine the mouth of the road lay between this lamp standard and the second from the next down there.’}}

# The flag or ensign carried by a military unit.

#* Fairfax

His armies, in the following day, / On those fair plains their standards proud display.

# One of the upright members that supports the horizontal axis of a transit or theodolite.

# Any upright support, such as one of the poles of a scaffold.

# A tree of natural size supported by its own stem, and not dwarfed by grafting on the stock of a smaller species nor trained upon a wall or trellis.

#* Sir W. Temple

In France part of their gardens is laid out for flowers, others for fruits; some standards , some against walls.

# The sheth of a plough.

A manual transmission vehicle.

(botany) The upper petal or banner of a papilionaceous corolla.

(shipbuilding) An inverted knee timber placed upon the deck instead of beneath it, with its vertical branch turned upward from that which lies horizontally.

A large drinking cup.

(Greene)