1 [onlybeforenoun] connected with the people who live in a country:
civil unrest (= that is caused by groups of people within a country)
seealsoCIVILWAR
2 [onlybeforenoun] connected with the state rather than with religion or with the armed forces:
a civil marriage ceremony
3 [onlybeforenoun] involving personal legal matters and not criminal law:
a civil court
compareCRIMINAL
seealsoCIVILLAW
4 polite in a formal way but possibly not friendly:
The less time I have to spend being civil to him the better!
OPPUNCIVIL
civilly adverb:
She greeted him civilly but with no sign of affection.
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for civil is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is civil a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, civil is tagged as adjective.
Does civil appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — civil appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.