commonweal

Meaning

Noun

• The common good; public wellbeing or prosperity
• The body politic; republic

Origin

• common + weal. From c. 1450, common wele was used as a compound.
• Rollison (2017) thinks that comun and wele may already have been used in collocation in 14th-century Middle English.
• By the 1520s used by some authors as the equivalent of res publica (republic), alongside commonwealth from about the same time.