Not run by, and not controlled by, a government. You will meet this word almost entirely in one place: the phrase "non-governmental organization", usually shortened to NGO. An NGO is a group that works on something public — poverty, human rights, disaster relief, the environment, education — but is not part of any government's machinery. Greenpeace, the Red Cross, Amnesty International, Oxfam: all NGOs.

The word is formal and a little bureaucratic. It was made in the world of the United Nations, and it still smells of that world — you see it in reports, applications for funding, and news about international aid. In ordinary talk, people simply say "an NGO" or name the group.

One honest wrinkle: the label says only what the group is NOT. It does not promise the group is small, poor, kind, or independent-minded. Many large NGOs take most of their money from governments, and some governments quietly set up their own "NGOs" so the label is doing very little work. So when you read that a group is non-governmental, you have learned one fact about its legal shape, not a fact about its character.

Occasionally you meet it outside that fixed phrase — "non-governmental funding", "non-governmental bodies" — but even there it is heavy, official-sounding English. Written both with and without the hyphen; "nongovernmental" is standard in American documents.