Commonwealth

A commonwealth is a traditional English term for a political community founded for the common good. The noun dates from the fifteenth century, rooted in the older sense of wealth as well-being and treated as analogous to the Latin res publica, so the term literally meant common well-being. By the seventeenth century the definition had broadened from this original sense of public welfare to mean a state in which supreme power is vested in the people, a republic or democratic state.