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:
Back in New Jersey, dinnertime with his biological family feels as cold and stale as their meal of frozen peas and store-bought white bread.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 6, 2026
Refined carbohydrates include foods such as white bread, pastries, and many sugary products that have been stripped of much of their natural fiber and nutrients.
From Science Daily ● Jul. 18, 2026
Remembering that she once said she craved white bread with butter and honey—all scarce commodities during the war, especially in this backwater—Nanning sets off on a mini-odyssey to gather them.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 16, 2026
Previous school food standards introduced in 2015 also included fruit and vegetable requirements, limiting sugar in drinks, and an emphasis on wholegrain foods instead of refined carbohydrates, like white bread or pasta.
From BBC ● Apr. 12, 2026
She cracked the eggs in a pot, whipped them with a fork, dipped in four slices of white bread, and laid them out in the frying pan on the stove.
From "October Sky" by Homer Hickam
But it was her TV ads for orange juice—featuring her own children, a cartoon bird, and a lilting jingle about the “Florida sunshine tree”—that made her the nation’s leading avatar for white-bread American wholesomeness.
From Slate ● Jan. 11, 2025
The goal was to enable Disney to avoid the honky-tonk character of development around Disneyland in Anaheim, and instead keep the Florida property in perfectly coiffed white-bread comeliness.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 23, 2023
By the end, we’ve mainly learned that Allen is the white-bread straight man to Rob’s enigmatic free spirit, which is not all that much by way of insights.
From New York Times ● Mar. 30, 2021
The international menus available these days are far removed from my white-bread Midwestern youth.
From Washington Post ● Nov. 12, 2018
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
Random Word
Spin the wheel and learn a new word!
Get a wordDefinitions 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.
