public square

noun

1

: an open public area in a city or town where people gather

St. Mark's Square in Venice is sinking at a time when this Italian city's popularity is rising. The world's most famous public square now floods an average of three out of every five days.

—Tom Crosby

2

: the sphere of public opinion

In an August 2007 speech, then-New York governor Eliot Spitzer expounded upon Reinhold Niebuhr and the virtues of humility in the public square.

—Lisa Miller

… using legal action to cow an opponent into silence, and withdrawal from the public square.

—Mark Steyn

Examples of public square in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

The owners of the virtual public square, who have more power than media moguls of the past could ever have dreamed of possessing, have been putting their fingers on the scale to advance a specific set of ideological agendas, as well as the fortunes of Democrats. —Daniel R. Depetris, Newsweek, 10 Jan. 2025

Mexico City’s Zócalo — where international artists such as Roger Waters, Paul McCartney and Rosalía have performed — is the country’s main public square and the second largest in the world after Tiananmen Square in Beijing. —Natalia Cano, Billboard, 3 Jan. 2025

Guests begin to see that in the artwork leading to the dining area, which is built to look like a cozy public square. —Eve Chen, USA TODAY, 21 Dec. 2024

Yet the increasingly normalized and casual use of the slur in the digital public square is so far removed from this framework of basic empathy, and from the euphemistic origins of the expression — a clinical term twisted for the purposes of disparagement — that the appeal to decency doesn’t apply. —Miles Klee, Rolling Stone, 7 Jan. 2025

Word History

First Known Use

1757, in the meaning defined at sense 1