white bread
noun
any white or light-colored bread made from finely ground, usually bleached, flour.
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white bread
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white-bread
white-breadadjectivepertaining to or characteristic of the white middle class; bourgeois.
white bread
1 Americannoun
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white breads
plural
white-bread
2
American
[hwahyt-bred, wahyt-]
/ ˈʰwaɪtˌbrɛd, ˈwaɪt- /
adjective
Informal.
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pertaining to or characteristic of the white middle class; bourgeois.
a typical white-bread suburban neighborhood.
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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:
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
She was holding a cup of coffee and a homemade turkey sandwich — white bread, cut on the diagonal, slathered with Kewpie mayo and layered with lettuce — tucked into a brown paper bag.
From Salon ● Jan. 19, 2026
Fruit sandwiches are typically made of sweetened, soft, spongy white bread filled with whipped cream and fruit, typically strawberries or clementine, says Shuko Oda, chef at Koya restaurant in London.
From BBC ● Jun. 27, 2025
I’ll stop in at some corner store on the way back, some place where they sell milk till midnight and slightly stale sliced white bread.
From "Cat's Eye" by Margaret Atwood
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
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.
