For brevity perhaps, not to misstate or mislead.
The first definition is from AHD. The second, Webster.
re·pub·lic (rĭ-pŭblĭk)
n. 1. A political order whose head of state is not a monarch and in modern times is usually a president.
2.a. A political order in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who are entitled to vote for officers and representatives responsible to them.
[French république, from Old French, from Latin rēspūblica : rēs, thing; see rē- in the Appendix of Indo-European roots + pūblica, feminine of pūblicus, of the people; see PUBLIC.]
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition copyright ©2022 by HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.
republic
noun
1a : a form of government in which the power belongs to a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by the leaders and representatives elected by those citizens to govern according to law
Please note the term "individual rights" does not appear in either definition.
Those definitions are obviously wrong, since those are the definitions of a democracy, based on majority rule.
Majority rule is often ridiculed by the term "mob rule".
It is not at all similar to a real republic.
{...
Democracy and
republic, while often used interchangeably, have distinct meanings, origins, and implications. Democracy is a system of
government in which laws, policies, leadership, and major undertakings of a state or other polity are directly or indirectly decided by the “people,” a group historically constituted by only a minority of the population (e.g., all free adult males in ancient
Athens or all sufficiently propertied adult males in 19th-century Britain) but generally understood since the mid-20th century to include all (or nearly all) adult citizens. In contrast, a republic is a form of government in which a
state is ruled by representatives of the citizen body.
The terms also differ in
etymology. The word
democracy has
Greek roots and is derived from
dēmokratia, which means “rule by the people,” while
republic has
Latin roots and is derived from the expression
res publica, which means “public good” or “public affair.” In ancient
Greece democracy originally referred to
direct democracy, a system in which people voted on laws and decisions themselves. In ancient
Rome republic simply meant a state or country and described a system where leaders were elected to represent the people.
In a “pure democracy”
sovereignty is directly exercised by the people, either through direct voting or through mechanisms that allow for public participation in decision-making. In a republic, sovereignty rests with the people, but it is exercised through elected representatives.
...}
It is more complex than that really, in that a republic requires a Constitution or other codified protections of individual rights.
But this was the first response.
