The Collaborative International Dictionary
Community \Com*mu"ni*ty\, n.; pl. Communities. [L. communitas: cf. OF. communit['e]. Cf. Commonalty, and see Common.]
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Common possession or enjoyment; participation; as, a community of goods.
The original community of all things.
--Locke.An unreserved community of thought and feeling.
--W. Irving. -
A body of people having common rights, privileges, or interests, or living in the same place under the same laws and regulations; as, a community of monks. Hence a number of animals living in a common home or with some apparent association of interests.
Creatures that in communities exist.
--Wordsworth. -
Society at large; a commonwealth or state; a body politic; the public, or people in general.
Burdens upon the poorer classes of the community.
--Hallam.Note: In this sense, the term should be used with the definite article; as, the interests of the community.
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Common character; likeness. [R.]
The essential community of nature between organic growth and inorganic growth.
--H. Spencer. -
Commonness; frequency. [Obs.]
Eyes . . . sick and blunted with community.
--Shak.
Wiktionary
n. (plural of community English)
Wikipedia
Communities: Life in Cooperative Culture is a quarterly magazine. It is a primary resource for information, issues, and ideas about intentional communities in North America - from urban co-ops to cohousing groups to ecovillages to rural communes. Articles and columns cover practical "how-to" issues of community living as well as personal stories about forming new communities, decision-making, conflict resolution, raising children in community, and sustainability.
Usage examples of "communities".
Even now-a-days the Russian peasants, if they are not quite broken down by misery, migrate in communities, and they till the soil and build the houses in com mon when they settle on the banks of the Amur, or in Manitoba.
Taking the village communities of the so-called barbarians at a time when they were making a new start of civilization after the fall of the Roman Empire, we have to study the new aspects taken by the sociable wants of the masses in the middle ages, and especially in the medieval guilds and the medieval city.
The difficulty was only to find such form as would permit to federate the unions of the guilds without interfering with the unions of the village communities, and to federate all these into one harmonious whole.
Audubon could not but admire "their peaceful communities, which require only being left in peace to enjoy happiness.
Even in the larger communities of Eskimos, "public opinion formed the real judgment-seat, the general punishment consisting in the offenders being shamed in the eyes of the people.
The clearing of the woods and the breaking of the prairies being mostly done by the communities or, at least, by the joint work of several families--always with the consent of the community--the cleared plots were held by each family for a term of four, twelve, or twenty years, after which term they were treated as parts of the arable land owned in common.
Such roads were traced by the "barbarians" all over Europe, and one must have travelled in wild, thinly-peopled countries, far away from the chief lines of communication, to realize in full the immense work that must have been performed by the barbarian communities in order to conquer the woody and marshy wilderness which Europe was some two thousand years ago.
Village communities alone, working in common, could master the wild forests, the sinking marshes, and the endless steppes.
On the contrary, we cannot but admire the deeply moral principles elaborated within the early village communities which found their expression in Welsh triads, in legends about King Arthur, in Brehon commentaries,(25) in old German legends and so on, or find still their expression in the sayings of the modern barbarians.
Each oulous has, moreover, its grain store for loans in case of need, its communal baking oven (the four banal of the old French communities), and its blacksmith, who, like the blacksmith of the Indian communities,(31) being a member of the community, is never paid for his work within the community.
There being no authority in a village community to impose a decision, this system has been practised by mankind wherever there have been village communities, and it is practised still wherever they continue to exist, i.
I conceive the early village communities as slowly originating directly from the gentes, and consisting, according to racial and local circumstances, either of several joint families, or of both joint and simple families, or (especially in the case of new settlements) of simple families only.
Kovalevsky, "In the Mountaineer Communities of Kabardia," in Vestnik Evropy, April, 1884.
The earliest barbarian codes already represent to us societies composed of peaceful agricultural communities, not hordes of men at war with each other.
Although the lord had succeeded in imposing servile labour upon the peasants, and had appropriated for himself such rights as were formerly vested in the village community alone (taxes, mortmain, duties on inheritances and marriages), the peasants had, nevertheless, maintained the two fundamental rights of their communities: the common possession of the land, and self-jurisdiction.