Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun People of gentle birth, good breeding, or high social position.
- noun An upper or ruling class.
- noun The class of English landowners ranking just below the nobility.
- noun People of a particular class or group.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun Noble birth or lineage; gentility.
- noun Family; gens.
- noun Gentle breeding or manners; courtesy; civility.
- noun A gentle or noble quality or action; a gentlemanly characteristic.
- noun The class of well-born and well-bred people; people of good position; in England, the class of people of means or leisure below the rank of the nobility, sometimes called the upper middle class.
- noun Persons of a particular class: usually applied in ironical civility to persons of an inferior sort.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun obsolete Birth; condition; rank by birth.
- noun People of education and good breeding; in England, in a restricted sense, those between the nobility and the yeomanry.
- noun obsolete Courtesy; civility; complaisance.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun Birth; condition; rank by birth.
- noun Courtesy; civility; complaisance.
- noun People of
education and goodbreeding . - noun UK In a restricted sense, those people between the
nobility and theyeomanry .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun the most powerful members of a society
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
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Examples
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(pray bear that in mind, gentle reader), gentry by birth, and incontestably so by my father's bearing the commission of good old George the Third, we were not _fine gentry_, but people who could put up with as much as any genteel Scotch family who find it convenient to live on a third floor in London, or on a sixth at Edinburgh or Glasgow.
Lavengro The Scholar - The Gypsy - The Priest, Vol. 1 (of 2) George Henry Borrow 1842
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(pray bear that in mind, gentle reader), gentry by birth, and incontestably so by my father's bearing the commission of good old George the Third, we were _not fine gentry_, but people who could put up with as much as any genteel Scotch family who find it convenient to live on a third floor in London, or on a sixth at Edinburgh or Glasgow.
Lavengro the Scholar - the Gypsy - the Priest George Henry Borrow 1842
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(pray bear that in mind, gentle reader), gentry by birth, and incontestably so by my father's bearing the commission of good old George the Third, we were not _fine gentry_, but people who could put up with as much as any genteel Scotch family who find it convenient to live on a third floor in London, or on a sixth at Edinburgh or Glasgow.
Lavengro; the Scholar, the Gypsy, the Priest George Henry Borrow 1842
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(pray bear that in mind, gentle reader), gentry by birth, and incontestably so by my father's bearing the commission of good old George the Third, we were not _fine gentry_, but people who could put up with as much as any genteel Scotch family who find it convenient to live on a third floor in London, or on a sixth at Edinburgh or Glasgow.
Lavengro The Scholar, the Gypsy, the Priest George Henry Borrow 1842
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These well-to-do, often politically connected professionals—including the increasingly intertwined wealthy of Wall Street, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley—espoused what might be called gentry liberalism, a creed according to which the middle classes had to be punished for their racism, sexism, and excess consumption.
Who Lost the Middle Class? Fred Siegel 2011
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The new California landed gentry is indeed a reality.
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The hard favour'd authority that the workers have presumably seen in the faces of the landed gentry is absent here.
'[S]hak[ing] the dwellings of the great': Liberation in Joanna Baillies Poems (1790) 2008
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And there were occasional cracks in gentry solidarity — especially when opportunity for preferment presented itself.
Gutenber-e Help Page 2005
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Polish writers use the word gentry, which doesn't sound quite right in English.
Poland Michener, James 1983
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Congress, the relatives of his wife, the titled gentry of Europe were treated with marked and lavish attention.
The Loyalist A Story of the American Revolution James Francis Barrett 1911
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