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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

When there aren’t marriageable or even dateable men around, fewer women marry and have children, a dynamic that has been particularly pronounced in America’s working class.

From Slate ● Jul. 6, 2026

Le Pen has always declared herself to be "neither left nor right", and her appeal is strongest among the old working class.

From BBC ● Jul. 4, 2026

Pate said recent Democratic wins in regional and local elections had given her "hope that the little people -- the working class — maybe are being heard."

From Barron's ● Jul. 4, 2026

In our survey, 39% of Americans identified as middle class, while 22% called themselves upper-middle class and 31% as working class.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 26, 2026

More so than the classes below and above them—the immobilized poor of old cities and rural backwaters, the factory-bound working class, and the old- and new-money rich—this is a fluid, unstable group.

From "Class Matters" by The New York Times

Rafferty was born into a working-class family in Paisley, Renfrewshire.

From BBC ● Jul. 15, 2026

Even in the Warsaw Ghetto, Ms. Crabapple writes, the Bundists “kept up their talk about working-class solidarity and the need to maintain ideological distinctions.”

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 14, 2026

Twitter Democrats stuck by Platner, believing that he was a good avatar for working-class politics and that real voters wouldn’t care that he was rough around the edges.

From Slate ● Jul. 14, 2026

The Ile-de-France region, which includes Paris, is home to large communities of working-class immigrants from the country’s former colonies.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 13, 2026

Occasionally I went to house-rent parties, parties given by working-class families to raise money to pay the landlord, the admission to which was a quarter or a half dollar.

From "Black Boy" by Richard Wright