pertaining to or characteristic of the white middle class; bourgeois.
a typical white-bread suburban neighborhood.
bland; conventional.
First recorded in 1300–50
First recorded in 1975–80
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
A loaf of basic medium slice white bread cost 65p in 2022 but that's now risen to 74p on average in the big supermarkets.
From BBC ● May 24, 2026
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
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
Processed food like white bread was called “plastic food.”
From "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan
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
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
To bake this bread, sift together one quart of this "whole-ground" rye flour and two quarts of white-bread flour.
From Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit among the "Pennsylvania Germans" by Thomas, Edith
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.
