:relating to or belonging to the middle class of society中产阶级的
the bourgeois class中产阶级
bourgeois families/businessmen中产阶级家庭/商人
2
[more bourgeois; most bourgeois]disapproving:having qualities or values associated with the middle class:too concerned about wealth, possessions, and respectable behavior具有中产阶级特性或价值观的;贪图享受的;追求名利的
bourgeois life/culture/society追求物质享受的生活/文化/社会
bourgeois attitudes/values贪图享受的态度/价值观
bourgeois materialism中产阶级的物质主义
— bourgeois
noun,pluralbourgeois/ˈbuɚʒˌwɑːz/[count]
He was a bourgeois, not a nobleman.他是个中产阶级,不是贵族。
a philosopher who had no sympathy for the bourgeois对中产阶级毫不同情的哲学家
AdjectiveIndignation 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 2000Even 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. 1999Or 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, 1975NounFor 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 2005With 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, 1990See More
Recent Examples on the Web
Adjective
Many officials speak of producing offspring as a moral duty, with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei condemning those who don’t as indulging in a decadent bourgeois affectation. Omid Khazani, Los Angeles Times, 14 Sep. 2022 In a subtle dig at racist stereotypes, Myriam is the bourgeois descendant of immigrants from North Africa, while Louise, the nanny who works for her, is white and French. Leslie Camhi, Vogue, 14 Sep. 2022 This doesn’t thrill his parents (Maria Dizzia and Josh Pais), whose bourgeois anxiety is both very uncool and entirely understandable. Mark Jenkins, Washington Post, 22 Aug. 2022 In this century, the suburbs became a site of bourgeois ambition. Masha Gessen, The New Yorker, 1 Aug. 2022 Born into a bourgeois Parisian family in 1821, Baudelaire fashioned himself into the original poète maudit, whose excoriating genius set him outside the graces of polite society. Sam Sacks, WSJ, 8 July 2022 Carrère isn’t in denial about his own ability to acquire, and enjoy, bourgeois comforts. Ian Parker, The New Yorker, 4 July 2022 On the verge of losing her identity completely, Carmen grows increasingly numb to the mundane nature of bourgeois delight. Holly Jones, Variety, 15 June 2022 Odessa Young)—sit erect at long dining tables in their mansion, the embodiment of tortured bourgeois ascendance. Doreen St. Félix, The New Yorker, 9 June 2022
Noun
In pre-Revolutionary Russia some critics derided his compositions as bourgeois work aimed at philistine audiences. Barrymore Laurence Scherer, WSJ, 3 Aug. 2022 As with any film featuring white, heterosexual, bourgeois Europeans strolling in the sun talking without embarrassment about art and ethics and suchlike, the spirit of Eric Rohmer hovers benignly. Jessica Kiang, Variety, 8 July 2022 According to Schattenberg, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev was born in Kamenskoe, Ukraine, into a family that was neither entirely working class nor petty bourgeois. Yuri Slezkine, The New York Review of Books, 25 May 2022 Trust begins like a fairly conventional bourgeois novel that portrays the rich interior lives and domestic spaces of the elite ruling class. Jane Hu, The Atlantic, 26 May 2022 My son says French films come in two types: the story of the poor and unhappy childhood, which plays as tragedy, and the story of the bourgeois neurotic, which plays as comedy. Rachel Kushner, Harper’s Magazine , 25 May 2022 Call this bourgeois, but sensuality and beauty make life worth the trouble. Brian T. Allen, National Review, 26 Feb. 2022 The family apartment was furnished with the antiques and historic paintings that his bourgeois business guests preferred.New York Times, 20 Apr. 2022 The power of deception, and its usefulness in unsettling bourgeois certitudes, is central to the depictions, which draw from yet playfully fictionalize real periods in Argentine history. Sam Sacks, WSJ, 18 Mar. 2022 See More
Word History
Etymology
Adjective and Noun
Middle French, from Old French burgeis townsman, from burc, borg town, from Latin burgus