white bread
noun
any white or light-colored bread made from finely ground, usually bleached, flour.
Jump To:
-
white bread
-
white-bread
white-breadadjectivepertaining to or characteristic of the white middle class; bourgeois.
white bread
1 Americannoun
-
white breads
plural
white-bread
2
American
[hwahyt-bred, wahyt-]
/ ˈʰwaɪtˌbrɛd, ˈwaɪt- /
adjective
Informal.
-
pertaining to or characteristic of the white middle class; bourgeois.
a typical white-bread suburban neighborhood.
-
bland; conventional.
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of white bread1
First recorded in 1300–50
Origin of white-bread2
First recorded in 1975–80
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Later, with the news of Hitler’s demise, she sinks into a depression, refusing food unless it’s white bread, butter and honey, all in scarce supply.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 24, 2026
Items such as white bread and potatoes score high, meaning they cause rapid spikes in blood sugar, while foods like whole grains and most fruits score lower and lead to slower increases.
From Science Daily ● Jan. 27, 2026
Each Friday, friends drove to Munger’s home for a potluck lunch, carrying chicken sandwiches with butter on soft white bread, the crusts sometimes removed.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 27, 2025
One of his creations for a typewriter-friendly bite was sliced onion and peanut butter on white bread, nothing fell apart.
From Salon ● Jul. 12, 2025
Swinging their grocery bags full of clean watery green onions and odorous liver-wurst and red catsup and white bread, they would dare each other on past the limits set by their stern mothers.
From "The Martian Chronicles" by Ray Bradbury
But over the last few decades, it’s evolved in ways, both gritty and grand, that make it more megalopolis than white-bread suburb.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 25, 2022
The colonel stifled Elvis’s desire to go for prestigious movies like “West Side Story” and pushed him to make white-bread girls-in-paradise pop musicals that got worse and worse.
From New York Times ● May 21, 2022
I remember that flight as though it happened last week — the noise of the plane, the uniformed soldiers, the white-bread sandwiches they gave us though no one was very hungry.
From Washington Post ● Mar. 29, 2019
Obviously, my rural, white-bread childhood during the ’50s wasn’t everybody’s ’50s.
From Seattle Times ● Jul. 1, 2016
Madame Dumoulin, the wife of a rich army-contractor, gave these dinners to her friends, but each guest was expected to bring with him his own white-bread.
From Queen Hortense A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era by L. (Luise) Mühlbach
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
