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What is "middle-class"

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
middle-class
adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
a middle-class upbringing
▪ She had a comfortable middle-class upbringing.
a middle-class/working-class etc area (=where a particular class of people live)
▪ She was born in a working-class area of London.
a working-class/middle-class background
▪ I came from a very poor working-class background.
a working-class/middle-class occupation
▪ Teaching is regarded as a middle-class occupation.
▪ Working-class occupations may be divided into skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled.
an upper-class/middle-class/working-class accent
▪ Sebastian spoke with an upper-class accent.
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADVERB
predominantly
▪ They tend to forget these interests when using predominantly middle-class women psychologists' arguments, for example.
▪ Not surprisingly, the result has been to recruit predominantly middle-class unemployed people into mainstream programmes.
▪ The predominantly middle-class character of the suburbs and the commuting population was to have important social consequences.
▪ In the 1960s and 1970s, psychologists strongly criticized the discipline's predominantly middle-class constitution.
■ NOUN
area
▪ Gbagbo won support in middle-class areas of the capital, and in the north-east of the country.
▪ By contrast the middle-class area has a relatively stable and prosperous population.
background
▪ This is confirmed by the following table of world-class champions and contenders from middle-class backgrounds.
▪ He is a wholly conscious arriviste, half proud and half ashamed of both his middle-class background and his upward mobility.
▪ Such as latch-key kids from middle-class backgrounds.
▪ As few as one in twenty of the sample could be described as a utilitarian scientist of puritan middle-class background.
child
▪ These schools now provided a free alternative to expensive private education - so that the number of middle-class children in them rose.
▪ The system was, perhaps irreversibly, biased towards the selection of middle-class children.
▪ The result for the middle-class child was an increased state of dependence, longer than that experienced by the previous generation.
▪ I felt intimidated at first because I'd never been in a school with so many middle-class children.
▪ Its children taunted nice little middle-class children in school uniform who strayed into its terrain.
▪ Sociologists had long been interested in why many working-class pupils did not do as well as middle-class children at school.
▪ And yet proportionately more middle-class children enter grammar schools.
▪ It has now been abolished, mainly because a number of middle-class children failed it and were sent to nonacademic schools.
citizen
▪ The middle-class citizen becomes the hero.
culture
▪ The values of privacy and the values of home are closely interwoven, especially in contemporary middle-class culture.
▪ But middle-class culture would probably prevent you from doing it; both you and he have too much to lose.
family
▪ She ran off with breakfast for her respectable middle-class family.
▪ Almost the same number are Bengali children of middle-class families, who attend the day school.
▪ Grammar school pupils were drawn disproportionately from middle-class families.
▪ Such techniques are not available to middle-class families with modest savings, or to small business owners holding long-term capital gains.
▪ We both come from those middle-income, middle-class families.
▪ Magazines of the day published architectural plans for craftsman bungalows that were affordable to working-class as well as middle-class families.
▪ Irene the heroine is a journalist from an upper middle-class family engaged to be married to an army officer.
▪ She knew how much the pay packet meant to that middle-class family.
home
▪ World middleweight champions Mickey Walker and Joey Giardello both came from solid middle-class homes, but fought like cavemen in the ring.
▪ What is one to make of those ordinary middle-class homes with ten or a dozen servants?
▪ Purists could be utterly ruthless about the menace working-class immorality posed to the middle-class home.
▪ The advantage is undeniably there; but what of the ever-increasing number from middle-class homes without books?
life
▪ The world he deals with, upper middle-class life from the 1920s onward, is his own world.
▪ They not only portrayed middle-class life and its problems but attacked the corruption and depravity of the nobility.
▪ The comfortable middle-class life she had enjoyed fell apart when parents John and Marie split up.
▪ It is one of several comedias lacrimosas which glorify middle-class life by presenting the interaction between this class and the nobility.
man
▪ Here is a black middle-class man speaking: Professional blacks are treated as rare specimens by most of their white colleagues.
▪ Completed questionnaires of 786 middle-class men were subjected to comprehensive statistical analysis.
▪ None of the middle-class men had incomes below £30 per week and over half had incomes in excess of £60.
▪ In the experience of friends who canvass for the Labour party, old, white, middle-class men are the rudest.
▪ The middle-class man, on the other hand, could predict a rising income for much of his life.
▪ As Reich puts it: The reactionary middle-class man perceives himself in the Fuhrer, in the authoritarian state.
▪ Nonstandard speech is appropriated to signify masculinity by even middle-class men.
▪ Their junior commanders were mainly young urban middle-class men, the sort who had formed the audience for Sukarno.
parent
▪ Pre-school facilities in general are mostly used by children of middle-class parents.
▪ Conversely, if middle-class parents stay, if they stay and fight, they can turn things around.
▪ They weep openly and harrowingly, unlike middle-class parents who are seldom willing to appear, seeing their grief as more private.
▪ Today middle-class parents read books on toddler development, attend parent workshops, and learn how to talk so children will listen.
▪ The children of some middle-class parents have taken up working-class occupations.
▪ For Gore, the disenfranchised are middle-class parents having trouble paying their kids' college loans.
▪ For middle-class parents at least, however, a new power is taking his place: the equally authoritarian medical expert.
▪ Urban middle-class parents have a choice of living in the city or in the suburbs.
people
▪ For example, most middle-class people do not belong to close-knit networks at all.
▪ But in their economic desperation, many business and middle-class people have slipped backward, politically.
▪ Our institutions were set up by middle-class people and the staff, even when their own origins are working-class, reflect those values.
▪ Harriet times, middle-class people skied not at resorts but at local hills.
▪ The camera reinforced journalistic and literary accounts of aspects of social life which had rarely been seen or experienced by middle-class people.
▪ They drive Ford Tauruses to the picket lines, as if they were normal middle-class people.
▪ This is all because middle-class people, the polls say, want to see the rich suffer first.
▪ It shows that nuclear power workers are nice, middle-class people who wouldn't hurt the environment for anything.
suburb
▪ We pull up at the door of the drum player's house in a middle-class suburb of La Paz.
▪ In this middle-class suburb lived many of her old students from Entally.
▪ An officer who spent his career patrolling a middle-class suburb would only in extreme circumstances be involved in a physical encounter.
tax
▪ To keep campaign pledges to make education his top priority, Clinton wants two new middle-class tax breaks for college tuition.
▪ In public, Mr Clinton also still claims to want a middle-class tax cut.
▪ His proposal fulfilled a 1992 campaign pledge to provide a middle-class tax cut.
▪ And even on taxes, Bush actually made a case for the Democrats' middle-class tax cuts, not his own.
value
▪ But neither passage is really written from a working-class viewpoint, for they impose middle-class values on working-class taste.
▪ Schools, he argues emphasise and embody middle-class values.
▪ For all his seeming rebellion against middle-class values, he remains essentially middle-class.
voter
▪ Some middle-class voters have supported the Labour Party and about one-third of working-class voters have traditionally cast their ballots for Conservative candidates.
▪ In the past year, the president has become the champion of government programs that middle-class voters want.
woman
▪ In common with Butler and Florence Nightingale, illness related to the strain experienced by middle-class women who moved into the public sphere.
▪ One precise category is aimed at: middle-class women who have had access to education and valorizing salaried jobs.
▪ The hysterical woman was the middle-class woman of leisure deprived of productive labour and imprisoned in dependence on her family.
▪ Although opportunities were limited for middle-class women, they did exist.
▪ They tend to forget these interests when using predominantly middle-class women psychologists' arguments, for example.
▪ It emerged in no small measure because middle-class women marched into the work force, leaving their own kids behind.
▪ Various authors have suggested or claimed that working-class women are satisfied with housework while middle-class women are not.
▪ Both hysterics and anorexics have almost invariably been middle-class women or girls.
PHRASES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
peculiarly British/female/middle-class etc
▪ Cellulite is a peculiarly female problem in which the hormone oestrogen plays a part.
the black/Jewish/middle-class etc vote
▪ Another astute electoral move helped to win 70% of the black vote for Kennedy.
▪ Ashcroft also addressed concerns raised about allegations of voter intimidation and other problems in Florida that may have depressed the black vote.
▪ Christie Whitman got 25 percent of the black vote in New Jersey.
▪ George Allen received 22 percent of the black vote.
▪ One of the keys to the Republican victory was the black vote.
▪ Q: Can the Democratic Party afford to take the black vote for granted?
▪ The drop in the black vote was estimated to be more than one hundred thousand.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ a middle-class neighborhood
▪ a middle-class view of life
▪ The audience was mainly middle-class men.
▪ They live in a middle-class neighbourhood on the edge of town.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ All the great middle-class moral reforms of the age had been achieved at the expense of pleasure and enjoyment.
▪ College is more expensive and more critical to middle-class status than in the past.
▪ I should add that these three incidents happened to intelligent, middle-class patients in hospitals with international reputations.
▪ Its members brought the same middle-class standards to black adoptions that they used for white adoptions.
▪ Most of his patients were middle-class women who suffered from hysteria.
▪ She knew how much the pay packet meant to that middle-class family.
▪ The middle-class YCs had been far more serious at school than Willis' lads.
▪ The Klan has been trying to recruit a new type of kid: young, middle-class and white.
Wiktionary
middle-class

a. 1 occupying a position between the upper class and the working class 2 characteristic of the middle class(es); reflective of that class's values and aspirations. Commonly associated with a desire for social respectability and an emphasis on family values and education.

WordNet
middle-class

adj. occupying a socioeconomic position intermediate between those of the lower classes and the wealthy [ant: upper-class, lower-class]

Usage examples of "middle-class".

No one in the meeting had the heart to suggest that Nostrildamus might see the future differently if the child had been white and middle-class, instead of a biracial girl from a marginal city neighborhood.

Redneck Baptists, rich liberals, yellow dog Democrats, middle-class blacks, young fire eaters, Uncle Toms, and bone-dumb bluegums working the bottomland north of town.

A stout middle-class man of forty-eight with a large, plump face, thinning hair and a rather Germanic if good-natured appearance, he had begun his career in China as a language student in 1907, and had served as Consul in cities from Hankow to Chungking.

All of them, moreover, both male and female, are very middle-class creatures who have come here, as usual, out of mythomania or stupidity.

Pi Alpha takes only a few pledges each year -- all attractive, all from middle-class families that find tuition a crushing burden.

He is a typical middle-class Englishman, deeply tainted with priggishness in his earlier years, but in great part freed from it by the sweet uses of adversity.

Indeed, it is probably impossible for the private sector to provide everyone with an adequate standard of living through wages, or even wages plus benefits, alone: too much of what we need, such as reliable child care, is just too expensive, even for middle-class families.

Many townspeople treated the hippies in a similar fashion, looking upon them as a sort of manna from heaven, hiring them--for example--to make adobes, because the freaks learned fast and were willing--again out of middle-class guilt, and also because they were independently wealthy anyway--to labor eight or ten hours a day at what amounted to slave wages.

The left-wing intelligentsia wanted to go on and on, sniggering at the Blimps, sapping away at middle-class morale, but still keeping their favoured position as hangers-on of the dividend-drawers.

Still, enough Italians became construction workers, enough Jews became businessmen and professionals, to create a middle-class cushion for class conflict.

Annette a virgin taste to form would be better than to have the silly, half-baked predilections of the English middle-class to deal with.

The places were larger than they looked at first glance, but still might have been dismissed as middle-class housing but for the gilding around the windows, doors, and immaculate edgework, and the fact that few middle-class townhouses sported upper-story gargoyles and such intricate wrought-iron works placed almost purely for decoration.

The man resembled in his physical appearance, dress, and usual manner only what he was supposed to resemble, a businessman of indeterminate age but probable middle years, a run-of-the-mill, middle-class American who was possessed of sufficient business acumen to afford to dress well, drive a midpriced but new auto, pay his bills on time and in full.

Although restaurants were numerous, this middle-class group generally preferred either to dine at home or, occasionally, to visit the more expensive urban restaurants.

Ironically, regular church-going, middle-class Americans are far more cosmopolitan than the self-styled sophisticates of the left.