the masses

Idioms  

1. The body of common people, or people of low socioeconomic status, as in TV sitcoms are designed to appeal to the masses. This idiom is nearly always used in a snobbish context that puts down the taste, intelligence, or some other quality of the majority of people. W.S. Gilbert satirized this view in the peers' march in Iolanthe (1882), in which the lower-middle class and the masses are ordered to bow down before the peers. Prime Minister William Gladstone took a different view (Speech, 1886): “All the world over, I will back the masses against the [upper] classes.” [First half of 1800s]

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Example Sentences

See Examples For:

the masses

The exact limit depends strongly on the masses of the dark matter halos where those seeds originally formed.

From Science Daily ● Aug. 27, 2026

She wrote thousands of songs, but it was television that made her most popular ones, and her, accessible to the masses.

From Salon ● Aug. 26, 2026

Yes, many do have themes and messages that are overt, or that spark reactions in the masses.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 13, 2026

The area was really busy and popular with tourists who stay in the masses of Airbnbs.

From BBC ● Aug. 7, 2026

So from this one experiment we learned the masses of the Earth, the Sun, the Moon, the other planets and their moons, and got contour lines into the bargain–not bad for a summer’s work.

From "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson