Etymology: < French commune municipal corporation, community (1155 in Old French: see sense 2), small administrative district governed by a mayor and municipal council as established by the National Assembly (1789: see sense 1a), revolutionary committee which controlled the government of Paris from 1789 to 1794 (1790: see sense 1b(a)), insurrectionary socialist government briefly established in Paris in the spring of 1871 (1871 or earlier: see sense 1b(b)), specific uses of commune common n.¹ Compare earlier common n.¹ (of which commune, commun are early spelling variants).Use in sense 3 is apparently not recorded in dictionaries of French and probably shows a semantic development within English. With sense 2 compare earlier common n.¹ and compare also the following isolated borrowing of post-classical Latin communia (see common n.¹):1837 F. Palgrave Merchant & Friar iii. 99 The lower or lowest order of the people,—‘calling themselves the Communia’.

Etymology: < commune v. Compare converse n.¹ N.E.D. (1891) gives only the pronunciation (kǫ·miūn) /ˈkɒmjuːn/.

Etymology: Originally a variant of common v., in later use partly distinguished in form in the senses below (compare later senses at common v. I.).On the origin of the variation in form see discussion at common v. Only forms with final -une (or -ewne ) in the written form have been placed at the present entry. Inflected forms in early use are frequently ambiguous, e.g. the past tense form comunyd (compare quot. 1418 at sense 1a) could be interpreted as corresponding to either comune or to comun (see common v.). Metrical evidence suggests that in addition to the type with stress on the first syllable and a reduced vowel or syllabic consonant in the second syllable reflected by common v., and the type with stress on the second syllable represented by commune , there was also a third type with primary stress on the first syllable and secondary stress on the second syllable (like the modern pronunciation of the noun commune n.¹), also normally represented in spelling as commune. This is found in verse in e.g. Pope, Cowper, Wordsworth, Scott, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, while e.g. Shakespeare, Milton, and Tennyson have stress sometimes on the first and sometimes on the second syllable. Stress on the first syllable is indicated by most dictionaries in the 18th cent., although practice varies in the 19th cent.; both types are given in N.E.D. (1891). Stress on the first syllable continues to be indicated as an alternative pronunciation in some contemporary pronouncing dictionaries.