community

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   a group of people living in a particular local area

   the team is drawn from all parts of the community

2. 2
   noun

   a group of nations having common interests

   they hoped to join the NATO community

3. 3
   noun

   common ownership

   they shared a community of possessions

4. 4
   noun

   agreement as to goals

   the preachers and the bootleggers found they had a community of interests

5. 5
   noun

   A group sharing common characteristics, such as the same language, law, religion, or tradition.

   [W]e are not borne to our ſelues alone, but the prince, the countrie, the parents, freends, wiues, children and familie, euerie of them doo claime an intereſt in vs, and to euerie of them we muſt be beneficiall: otherwiſe we doo degenerate from that communitie and ſocietie, which by ſuch offices by vs is to be conſtrued, & doo become moſt vnprofitable: […]

6. 6
   noun

   A residential or religious collective; a commune.

   The Beguines, an uncloistered religiously inspired woman's movement began about the year 1210 in Liége, Belgium. Generally the Beguines lived in community or in small cottages behind a wall. At times threatened as heretics, they were finally disbanded by the Reformation.

7. 7
   noun

   A group of interdependent organisms inhabiting the same region and interacting with each other.

   Synecology has for the objects of its study, not individual organisms but biological communities, which are groups of organisms living in a given space, the properties of which space select a certain assemblage of organisms of definite autecological characteristics. Such communities are moreover not merely collections of organisms of restricted autecology, but tend to become organized by the biotic relationships that exist beteen the various individuals comprising the community.

8. 8
   noun

   A group of people interacting by electronic means for educational, professional, social, or other purposes; a virtual community.

   Spam texts are encoded but no decryption is possible. There is no plaintext message. I find them wonderful, and read them as poetics, as odd fragments generative of narrtives and scenography. I find the process of their production wonderful as well. The texts are written to elude community standards and means of censorship, and at the same time to enter and impose themselves into the standards and means for the community to read itself.

Etymology

From Late Middle English communite, borrowed from Old French communité, comunité, comunete (modern French communauté), from Classical Latin commūnitās (“community; public spirit”), from commūn(is) (“common, ordinary; of or for the community, public”) + -itās. By surface analysis, commun(e) + -ity. Displaced native Old English ġemǣnsċipe. Doublet of communitas.