From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishbourgeoisbour‧geois /ˈbʊəʒwɑː $ bʊrˈʒwɑː/ adjective 1 CLASS IN SOCIETYbelonging to the middle class She came from a bourgeois family. bourgeois morality2 GREEDYtoo interested in having a lot of possessions and a high position in society the backlash against bourgeois materialism3 CLASS IN SOCIETYbelonging to or typical of the part of society that is rich, educated, owns land etc, according to Marxism → proletarian —bourgeois noun [countable] → petty bourgeois
Examples from the Corpus
bourgeois• bourgeois attitudes and values• a bourgeois capitalist• Unconsciously perhaps Jeanne was seeking to free herself from her narrow and oppressively respectable bourgeois family.• They never married because they believed that marriage was a bourgeois institution.• Zhao was also accused of encouraging the spread of bourgeois liberalization and personal corruption.• She rejected her parents' conventional bourgeois lifestyle.• The Giral government, consisting entirely as it did of bourgeois Republicans, was increasingly irrelevant to the new situation.• All avant-garde movements were anti-bourgeois and yet all were assimilated by the structures of bourgeois society.• And yet here was his father on the brink of suicide destroyed by a bourgeois system that he so admired.• Their use many centuries later in sentimental comedy or bourgeois tragedy was purely artificial.• And the gap which separated them from the bourgeois world was wide - and unbridgeable.Origin bourgeois (1500-1600) French “person who lives in a town”, from Old French borjois, from borc “town”, from Latin burgus “castle, town defended by a wall” 