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• working class
  working class

  noun

  those persons working for wages, especially in manual labor.
• working-class
  working-class

  adjective

  of, relating to, or characteristic of the working class, the class of wage earners or manual laborers.

working class

¹ American  

noun

• working classes
  plural

1. those persons working for wages, especially in manual labor.

2. the social or economic class composed of these workers.

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working-class ² American  

[wur-king-klas] / ˈwɜr kɪŋˌklæs /

adjective

1. of, relating to, or characteristic of the working class, the class of wage earners or manual laborers.

   He came from a working-class neighborhood in Nova Scotia, where his mother took in laundry and his father had a job in the coal mine.

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working class British  

noun

1. Also called: proletariat. the social stratum, usually of low status, that consists of those who earn wages, esp as manual workers Compare lower class middle class upper class

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adjective

1. of, relating to, or characteristic of the working class

working class Cultural  

1. In the United States, the population of blue-collar workers, particularly skilled and semiskilled laborers, who differ in values, but not necessarily in income, from the middle class. In Marxism, this term refers to propertyless factory workers.

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Other Word Forms

Derived Forms

• working-class
  adjective

Inflected Forms

Nouns

• working classes
  plural

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Etymology

Origin of working class¹

First recorded in 1805–15

Origin of working-class²

First recorded in 1830–40

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Example Sentences

See Examples For:

working class working-class

Simply appearing to be Latino and working class is insufficient, Frimpong wrote, even if a person shares those characteristics with an identified target.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 29, 2026

Like blacks, Hispanics are overrepresented in the working class, and blue-collar workers saw wages rise at faster rates than management in the years leading up to the pandemic.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 27, 2026

His Democratic rival is Bob Brooks, a former firefighter and political newcomer who positions himself as a voice for the working class.

From Barron's ● Oct. 19, 2026

He set out major new policies - not always a given on these occasions - and spoke with real emotion about his family and working class roots.

From BBC ● Sep. 29, 2026

“His trial will be an education for the working class, and for you, too, if you’ll come.”

From "Black Boy" by Richard Wright

For his supporters, Lula is a working-class hero credited with advancing workers' rights through organising strikes and lifting millions of people out of poverty with generous social welfare programmes as president.

From BBC ● Oct. 24, 2026

It’s not so great, as Baird put it, for working-class or lower-income Americans living paycheck to paycheck.

From MarketWatch ● Oct. 23, 2026

Today, however, that encompasses solidly middle-class, even working-class, households, not the $500,000+ cadre.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 20, 2026

For many working-class New Yorkers, that was the closest thing to a retirement account they ever held.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 19, 2026

But the working-class child is usually least prepared for the change.

From "Hunger of Memory" by Richard Rodriguez

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