embourgeoisement

[em-boor-zhwahz-muhnt, -mahnt, ahm-, ahn-boor-zhwaz-mahn]

noun

1. the acquisition or adoption of middle-class values and manners.

embourgeoisement

/ ɑ̃burʒwazmɑ̃ /

noun

1. the process of becoming middle-class; the assimilation into the middle class of traditionally working-class people

Word History and Origins

Origin of embourgeoisement¹

< French, equivalent to s’embourgeois ( er ) to become bourgeois ( em- ¹, bourgeois ¹ ) + -ment -ment

Word History and Origins

Origin of embourgeoisement¹

from French, from _en- ¹ + _bourgeois ¹

Example Sentences

“We may as well recognize,” writes Said, in describing why Europe needed this idea of the “licentious” East, “that for 19th-century Europe, with its increasing embourgeoisement, sex had been institutionalized to a very considerable degree. On the one hand, there was no such thing as ‘free’ sex, and on the other, sex in society entailed a web of legal, moral, even political and economic obligations of a detailed and certainly encumbering sort.”

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Avedon enjoyed his rapid embourgeoisement.

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In the cards’ forced festivity, their embourgeoisement of celebration, freedom rang.

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In later years, Mr. Stone shifted into what he described as “embourgeoisement.”

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In 1963, though, the sociologists John H. Goldthorpe and David Lockwood disputed this widely held “embourgeoisement thesis,” arguing that the erosion of social class had not been as great as believed.

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