How to Use bourgeois in a Sentence

bourgeois

1 of 2 adjective
  • Some of it was wrapped up with the idea that eating out is a bourgeois indulgence.
    New York Times, 19 May 2021
  • But her rebelling was to be even more bourgeois than our parents were.
    Doreen St. Félix, The New Yorker, 29 Sep. 2022
  • The bourgeois runway trend made an impact too, as did pant suits.
    Brooke Bobb, Vogue, 21 Dec. 2019
  • What could these bourgeois housewives know about pleasing a man?
    Gail Sheehy, Daily Intelligencer, 9 Sep. 2017
  • The satire of bourgeois affluence can seem glib and overextended.
    Ben Brantley, New York Times, 18 Feb. 2018
  • My boyfriend didn’t want to go in – too expensive, too bourgeois.
    Margaret Wappler, Orange County Register, 27 July 2019
  • Such a thing would of course be impossible for a married man living a respectable bourgeois life.
    Christopher Beha, Harper's Magazine, 27 Apr. 2020
  • As the turmoil grows, the stalwarts of Marina's bourgeois world cling to the hope that their old world will be restored.
    Steve Donoghue, The Christian Science Monitor, 21 Dec. 2017
  • Hope and faith and justice and courage: these are all fostered by bourgeois capitalism.
    Patrick J. Deneen, Harper’s Magazine , 5 Jan. 2023
  • Your books and movies have a consistent theme: a hatred for bourgeois conformity.
    Claudia Dreifus, The New York Review of Books, 29 Apr. 2021
  • Xi doesn’t even play golf, which was banned for years in China as a bourgeois indulgence.
    Bess Levin, The Hive, 5 Apr. 2017
  • There is in the play this sort of cri de coeur from Priestly that's condemning bourgeois greed and narcissism.
    Adam Green, Vogue, 7 Sep. 2017
  • The Blue House, with its carved ringlets and ornate rooms, stuck out as a symbol of bourgeois decadence.
    Inna Lazareva, Town & Country, 9 Mar. 2022
  • Members of the lower tribe work hard and dream big, but are more removed from traditional bourgeois norms.
    Charles P. Pierce, Esquire, 31 Jan. 2012
  • In this century, the suburbs became a site of bourgeois ambition.
    Masha Gessen, The New Yorker, 1 Aug. 2022
  • Guilt over his bourgeois lifestyle, his out-of-touchness with the common people.
    Vulture, 3 Sep. 2022
  • The Paper Palace has long since been sold (and reclad in bourgeois shingles).
    Penelope Green, New York Times, 13 Aug. 2022
  • Winning over more bourgeois voters means tempering their message in some ways.
    The Economist, 3 Feb. 2018
  • Unlike my mother, my grandmother had grown old the proper, bourgeois way.
    Catherine Texier, Longreads, 24 Oct. 2019
  • Red Guards took away his family’s piano, damning it as a bourgeois bauble.
    Jay Nordlinger, National Review, 16 Nov. 2021
  • Beaton had an artist’s eye for detail, a designer’s eye for value and a bourgeois work ethic.
    Dominic Green, WSJ, 1 Oct. 2021
  • After all, no one really needs such a bourgeois water bottle.
    Natalie Rigg, Los Angeles Times, 26 May 2021
  • Not even the wildest excesses of his later life would change his fundamentally bourgeois nature.
    Janet Maslin, New York Times, 10 Oct. 2019
  • Paris is a village: the fashion scene there is dominated by bourgeois scions and privileged girls who promote and help each other.
    Carine Bizet, Vogue, 17 Jan. 2023
  • Manet’s refusal to play along with the strictures of academic art matches his refusal to cater to France’s bourgeois fantasies.
    Jackson Arn, The New Yorker, 11 Oct. 2023
  • The core habit of bourgeois life — deferred gratification — has lost its grip on the American soul.
    Andrew Sullivan, Daily Intelligencer, 20 Feb. 2018
  • His interest is not in groups or collectives or even in social breakdown, except when refracted through the bourgeois male.
    Siddhartha Deb, The New Republic, 21 Jan. 2020
  • Nicolas Sarkozy had Neuilly-sur-Seine, one of the most bourgeois suburbs of Paris.
    Jean-Marie Pottier, Slate Magazine, 9 May 2017
  • What a pleasure, then, to come across a story in which maids occupy center stage from beginning to end and are as clever and capricious as any bourgeois heroine.
    Chandrahas Choudhury, WSJ, 12 May 2017
  • Her identity is defined by the bourgeois perfection of her material world.
    John Lahr, The New Yorker, 4 Nov. 2019
Advertisement

bourgeois

2 of 2 noun
  • The second is, the way that the men behaved is part of bourgeois values.
    Jesse Singal, Daily Intelligencer, 9 Sep. 2017
  • But the thrust of the essay was right about the importance of bourgeois values.
    Mona Charen, National Review, 8 Sep. 2017
  • Here, the story is based in more skittish black bourgeois art-world elitism.
    Armond White, National Review, 1 Sep. 2021
  • The decadence served at pricey bourgeois restaurants are withheld from the tongues of those who craft such pleasures.
    refinery29.com, 31 May 2018
  • Those three presidents had been raised in the ideals of bourgeois knightliness.
    Lance Morrow, WSJ, 14 Dec. 2018
  • Members of the rich elite are referred to as fifis, the equivalent of bourgeois.
    New York Times, 29 June 2018
  • Le bourgeois gentilhomme Suite was a delight through and through.
    Scott Cantrell, Dallas News, 20 Feb. 2021
  • Like pious Carmela in her haute bourgeois drag, art museums are married to the mob.
    Rhonda Lieberman, The New Republic, 23 Sep. 2019
  • What about Flaubert’s mantra about living like a bourgeois in order to create wild art?
    James Wood, The New Yorker, 24 Jan. 2022
  • The portrait that emerges is more complicated than the common views of Franklin as either a smug bourgeois or a genial old man.
    New York Times, 1 Sep. 2021
  • San Ángel Inn is where the bourgeois bring their mom for Mother’s Day brunch.
    Cnt Editors, CNT, 19 Sep. 2017
  • Call this bourgeois, but sensuality and beauty make life worth the trouble.
    Brian T. Allen, National Review, 26 Feb. 2022
  • Delano is an uptight bourgeois black fellow from Oak Park.
    Tony Adler, Chicago Reader, 2 July 2018
  • Aline was a seamstress from the countryside and so seeing her breastfeed was less shocking to an uptight bourgeois audience.
    Claire Moran, CNN, 20 Dec. 2022
  • The world that comes into focus feels less cosily bourgeois than his reputation would suggest.
    B.t. | Delft, The Economist, 16 Oct. 2019
  • The family apartment was furnished with the antiques and historic paintings that his bourgeois business guests preferred.
    New York Times, 20 Apr. 2022
  • The staff is also trying to find an approach to curation so exhibits aren't relevant only to a bourgeois elite.
    Maya Dukmasova, Chicago Reader, 5 July 2017
  • Mann’s new style is modernism in a high-bourgeois mode, as byzantine in its layering as anything in Joyce.
    Alex Ross, The New Yorker, 17 Jan. 2022
  • Justin Jain plays the usurping bourgeois Lopakhin, who has purchased the house and its beautiful, fruitless orchard.
    Helen Shaw, Vulture, 14 May 2022
  • Like his Vetements shows, this one had a dark, street edge, with a bourgeois lady nominally at the center.
    Cathy Horyn, The Cut, 2 Oct. 2017
  • The bourgeois, the wealthy and the private sector are the groups President Nicolás Maduro blames for Venezuela’s recession.
    Carlos HernÁndez, New York Times, 10 Aug. 2016
  • In larger bourgeois homes with multiple rooms, the bedroom also served as the central family gathering place.
    Nika Mavrody, The Atlantic, 19 May 2017
  • The voyageurs, manageurs du lard, and bourgeois that MacKenzie worked with had already discovered and mapped much of the continent by then.
    Porter Fox, Outside Online, 19 Apr. 2018
  • This is the warped psychology of the sophisticated bourgeois liberal.
    Armond White, National Review, 30 July 2021
  • The striking color is a specific scarlet chosen by Davis to replace the brand’s previous bourgeois burgundy.
    Rory Satran, WSJ, 6 Feb. 2023
  • That maxim—a sound mind in a sound body—is the sort of bourgeois faux-wisdom that fails to equip Aickman’s civil servants to deal with the supernatural.
    Josephine Livingstone, The New Republic, 7 May 2018
  • 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
  • Madame Simenon tortured young Georges, his father, and herself with her dreams of bourgeois elevation.
    Vince Passaro, Harper's magazine, 22 July 2019
  • 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
  • Bourgeois said Ely preyed on others and originally set bail at $1 million.
    Grace Wong, chicagotribune.com, 13 May 2017

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'bourgeois.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: