middle-classˌmiddle-ˈclass ●●○ adjective 
Examples
a middle-class family They lived a comfortable middle-class life.2middle-class attitudes and ideas are typical of middle-class people and are often concerned with the idea that people should work hard, have a good education, and try to earn enough money to live a comfortable life
ExamplesEXAMPLES FROM OTHER DICTIONARIES
Thesaurus- 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.
- 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.
Longman Language Activatorthe middle class► middle-class
Collocations belonging to the class of people who are usually well educated, fairly rich, and who work in jobs which they have trained to do. For example, doctors, lawyers, and managers are middle-class: · The newspaper's readers are mostly middle class.· They live in a middle-class neighbourhood on the edge of town.
► bourgeois typical of richer middle-class people and their attitudes or way of life, especially their concern with money, property, and correct social behaviour: · She rejected her parents' conventional bourgeois lifestyle.· They never married because they believed that marriage was a bourgeois institution.
► the bourgeoisie the class that owns most of the wealth, property, and industry - use this especially when you are talking about politics or history: · The poor viewed with envy the increasing wealth of the bourgeoisie.· A revolution would be a threat to the nation's bourgeoisie.
► white-collar: white-collar worker/job/employee someone who works in an office, not a factory, mine etc: · The economic recession has put many white-collar workers in danger of losing their jobs.
COLLOCATIONS FROM THE CORPUSADVERB► predominantly
1typical of people who are educated and work in professional jobs: · 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.
a middle-class family They lived a comfortable middle-class life.2middle-class attitudes and ideas are typical of middle-class people and are often concerned with the idea that people should work hard, have a good education, and try to earn enough money to live a comfortable life