common or garden

(used before a noun; sometimes hyphenated) Standard, unexceptional, or commonly found. Primarily heard in UK. That's just your common or garden house spider; there's no need to be concerned about its bite. I'm just looking for a common-or-garden mobile phone; I don't need anything fancy. I just need a common or garden birthday cake for my one-year-old to smash at his birthday party.

common-or-garden

BRITISH or

garden-variety

AMERICAN

COMMON You use common-or-garden to describe something of a very ordinary kind and with no special features. These are designer rain boots — not your common-or-garden wellies. He's just a common-or-garden petty criminal. The experiment itself is garden-variety science that normally would attract little public attention. Note: These expressions were originally used to describe the most ordinary variety of a species of plant.

Collins COBUILD Idioms Dictionary, 3rd ed. © HarperCollins Publishers 2012

common or garden

of the usual or ordinary type. British informal

Common or garden was originally used to describe a plant in its most familiar domesticated form, e.g. ‘the common or garden nightshade’.

1964 Leonard Woolf Letter I certainly do not agree that the unconscious mind reveals deeper truths about someone else than plain common or garden common sense does.

ˌcommon or ˈgarden

(British English) (American English ˈgarden-variety) (informal) ordinary; not unusual: ...a pet shop full of snakes and spiders, and not a common or garden rabbit or hamster in sight!