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.
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
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
But they also endorse foods like red meat and full-fat dairy, while taking a hard line against highly processed foods, added sugar and refined carbohydrates like white bread.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 7, 2026
Chef Busato on tasting a Korean milk bread, a fluffy white bread filled with cream, said he thinks it would do well in Europe.
From BBC ● Jun. 11, 2025
Like, a whole crab with legs and pincher claws, all fried up, wedged between two pieces of white bread.
From "As Brave As You" by Jason Reynolds
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
At first, Lewyn’s worldly sophistication seems to make a mockery of his new friend’s white-bread lifestyle and theatrical spirituality.
From Washington Post ● May 31, 2022
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
A little simple cerate should be spread on lint, and be applied every morning to the part affected, and a white-bread poultice, every night, until it is quite healed.
From Advice to a Mother on the Management of Her Children by Chavasse, Pye Henry
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.
