¹bourgeois

adjective bour·geois \ˈbu̇rzh-ˌwä also ˈbu̇zh- or ˈbüzh- or bu̇rzh-ˈ\

: relating to or belonging to the middle class of society

: having qualities or values associated with the middle class : too concerned about wealth, possessions, and respectable behavior

Full Definition of BOURGEOIS

: of, relating to, or characteristic of the social middle class

: marked by a concern for material interests and respectability and a tendency toward mediocrity

: dominated by commercial and industrial interests : capitalistic

— bour·geois·ifi·ca·tion \ˌbu̇(r)zh-ˌwä-zə-fə-ˈkā-shən\ noun

— bour·geois·ify \bu̇(r)zh-ˈwä-zə-ˌfī\ verb

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Indignation about the powers that be and the bourgeois fools who did their bidding—that was all you needed … You were an intellectual. —Tom Wolfe, Harper's, June 2000
Even before the 19th century was over, successive waves of collection mania had rolled across Europe and America, submerging country homes and bourgeois town houses in ferns and faux-Grecian ruins … —Liesl Schillinger, New York Times Book Review, 7 Feb. 1999
Or is Sartre's existentialism to be understood as only a way station in his transit from a bourgeois intellectual to a Marxist ideologue? —Walker Percy, “The State of the Novel,” 1977, in Signposts in a Strange Land, 1991
… the United States … was the bourgeois nation par excellence, in which, it might be said, the values of trade were transmogrified into ideals of freedom. —Robert Penn Warren, Democracy and Poetry, 1975
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Middle French, from Old French burgeis townsman, from burc, borg town, from Latin burgus

First Known Use: circa 1565

noun bour·geois \ˈbu̇rzh-ˌwä also ˈbu̇zh- or ˈbüzh- or bu̇rzh-ˈ\

plural bour·geois \-ˌwä(z), -ˈwä(z)\

a : burgher

b : a middle-class person

: a person with social behavior and political views held to be influenced by private-property interest : capitalist

plural : bourgeoisie

For many, Nietzsche has always been a bugaboo, though some regard him as an heroic destroyer of idols, the invigorating voice of skepticism, and a revealer of those embarrassing actualities that the pieties and protestations of the bourgeois have customarily concealed. —William H. Gass, Harper's, August 2005
With exceptions like Rousseau, the philosophes were elitists. They enlightened through noblesse oblige in company with noblemen, and often with a patronizing attitude toward the bourgeois as well as the common people. —Robert Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette, 1990
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