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
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
But swapping it for refined carbs like white bread, pizza and baked goods doesn’t seem to provide any benefit, he said.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 18, 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
As for my penny, I purchased some white bread from a street vendor.
From "Crispin: The Cross of Lead" by Avi
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
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
Obviously, my rural, white-bread childhood during the ’50s wasn’t everybody’s ’50s.
From Seattle Times ● Jul. 1, 2016
Gamse was with Ruiz in New York while he was watching “Shark Tank,” a reality show in which investors bet on or belittle a series of amateurs proposing mostly white-bread inventions.
From Washington Post ● Mar. 6, 2015
But Bellizarius, the brave Generall, will flame high and cleare like a Beacon; but your Puritane Eugenius will burne blew, blew like a white-bread sop in Aqua Vitae.
From A Collection of Old English Plays, Volume 1 by Bullen, A. H. (Arthur 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.
