WORD OF THE DAY
The adjective bourgeois means relating to or typical of the middle class. If someone says, "Oh, how bourgeois!" it's probably an insult, meaning you're preoccupied with middle-class small-mindedness.
As a noun, a bourgeois is a member of the middle class, originally a member of the middle class in France. The word was borrowed from French, from Old French burgeis "citizen of a town," from borc "town, village," from Latin burgus "fortress, castle." The derived word bourgeoisie "the middle class" is a later borrowing from French.
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Vocabulary lists containing bourgeois
In the 1940s, a working class African-American family in Chicago must decide how to best spend a ten-thousand dollar insurance payout.
In J.D. Salinger's classic novel, Holden Caulfield leaves his prep school and experiences disillusionment and alienation while wandering around New York City.
Sometimes there are words that you've seen, read and maybe even used in conversation whose meaning you can never keep straight. Even after looking it up, the right definition doesn't stick. Here are 15 words with definitions that can be difficult to remember. Some look like they have a negative element in them, but either because their positive counterpoint has fallen out of use or because it never existed in the first place, the word doesn't really have a negative sense. Other words below are often confused for their opposite or have come to have connotations not quite reflected in their dictionary definitions.
