The Collaborative International Dictionary
Commonplace \Com"mon*place`\, n.
An idea or expression wanting originality or interest; a trite or customary remark; a platitude.
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A memorandum; something to be frequently consulted or referred to.
Whatever, in my reading, occurs concerning this our fellow creature, I do never fail to set it down by way of commonplace.
--Swift.Commonplace book, a book in which records are made of things to be remembered.
Wiktionary
alt. A personal notebook or journal in which memorabilia, quotations etc were written. n. A personal notebook or journal in which memorabilia, quotations etc were written.
WordNet
n. a notebook in which you enter memorabilia
Wikipedia
Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. Such books are essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces are used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they have learned. Each commonplace book is unique to its creator's particular interests. They became significant in Early Modern Europe.
"Commonplace" is a translation of the Latin term locus communis (from Greek tópos koinós, see literary topos) which means "a theme or argument of general application", such as a statement of proverbial wisdom. In this original sense, commonplace books were collections of such sayings, such as John Milton's commonplace book. Scholars have expanded this usage to include any manuscript that collects material along a common theme by an individual.
Commonplace books are not diaries nor travelogues, with which they can be contrasted: English Enlightenment philosopher John Locke wrote the 1706 book A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books, "in which techniques for entering proverbs, quotations, ideas, speeches were formulated. Locke gave specific advice on how to arrange material by subject and category, using such key topics as love, politics, or religion. Commonplace books, it must be stressed, are not journals, which are chronological and introspective."
By the early eighteenth century they had become an information management device in which a note-taker stored quotations, observations and definitions. They were even used by influential scientists. Carl Linnaeus, for instance, used commonplacing techniques to invent and arrange the nomenclature of his Systema Naturae (which is the basis for the system used by scientists today).
Usage examples of "commonplace book".
The advantage of this is that he is enabled to make use of Don Quixote as a mouthpiece for his own reflections, and so, without seeming to digress, allow himself the relief of digression when he requires it, as freely as in a commonplace book.
Jefferson himself developed the habit of abridging everything he read and urged every law student to keep a commonplace book in which “.
In the meantime, he was reading Milton, Virgil, Voltaire, Viscount Bolingbroke's Letters on the Study and Use of History, and copying long extracts in a literary commonplace book.
She still remembers the lines of poems the Englishman read out loud to her from his commonplace book.