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• working class
  working class

  noun

  those persons working for wages, especially in manual labor.
• working-class
  working-class

  adjective

  of, relating to, or characteristic of the working class, the class of wage earners or manual laborers.

working class

¹ American  

noun

working classes plural

1. those persons working for wages, especially in manual labor.

2. the social or economic class composed of these workers.

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working-class ² American  

[wur-king-klas] / ˈwɜr kɪŋˌklæs /

adjective

1. of, relating to, or characteristic of the working class, the class of wage earners or manual laborers.

   He came from a working-class neighborhood in Nova Scotia, where his mother took in laundry and his father had a job in the coal mine.

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working class British  

noun

1. Also called: proletariat.  the social stratum, usually of low status, that consists of those who earn wages, esp as manual workers Compare lower class middle class upper class

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adjective

1. of, relating to, or characteristic of the working class

working class Cultural  

1. In the United States, the population of blue-collar workers, particularly skilled and semiskilled laborers, who differ in values, but not necessarily in income, from the middle class. In Marxism, this term refers to propertyless factory workers.

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Other Word Forms

Derived Forms

• working-class
  adjective

Inflected Forms

Nouns

• working classes
  plural

Etymology

Origin of working class¹

First recorded in 1805–15

Origin of working-class²

First recorded in 1830–40

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

working class working-class

In Philadelphia—where kids are down 6%—Nija Rivera, 39, grew up working class in a row house with her siblings, mother, grandmother and great-grandmother.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 27, 2026

She describes getting into the prestigious university as "a massive deal" but she found the atmosphere strange and experienced some snobbery about her working class accent.

From BBC ● Jul. 26, 2026

A different measure of pay doesn’t show a marked rise for the working class.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 23, 2026

Streeting, 43, comes from a working class background and is seen as being on the right flank of the centre-left party.

From Barron's ● Jul. 20, 2026

She was a child of the working class who, through ill-considered choices and circumstance, slipped into the welfare class and had to fight her way out.

From "Class Matters" by The New York Times

But it’s not just the buzzing that’s annoying residents in this working-class neighborhood — there are health concerns.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 23, 2026

When Beckham accepted his star on the Walk of Fame, he reflected he had never imagined "a working-class English footballer" would receive such an honour.

From BBC ● Jul. 20, 2026

“Downton Abbey” welcomed Tom Branson, a working-class Irishman, into their home and family when the youngest Crawley daughter, Sybil, eloped with him.

From Salon ● Jul. 19, 2026

And conversely, industrial businesses moved into working-class neighborhoods because the land was cheaper and the zoning sometimes iffy.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 15, 2026

The shift in focus served to align the goals of the Civil Rights Movement with key political goals of poor and working-class whites, who were also demanding economic reforms.

From "The New Jim Crow" by Michelle Alexander