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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

Even as Parton became world-famous, her life and music remained resonant to women, particularly those of the rural white working class.

From Salon ● Aug. 25, 2026

Conventional definitions of the working class often miss how people understand their own place in society.

From Salon ● Aug. 9, 2026

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

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

“His trial will be an education for the working class, and for you, too, if you’ll come.”

From "Black Boy" by Richard Wright

Such trends were in plain sight in Tor Bella Monaca, a working-class eastern suburb of Rome dotted by rundown apartment blocks, cash-for-gold shops and discount stores.

From Barron's ● Sep. 2, 2026

"I grew up in a working-class Caribbean family where swimming wasn't a thing that was done," he says.

From BBC ● Aug. 31, 2026

Mr. El-Sayed cleaned up in Washtenaw County, home of the University of Michigan, while losing majority-black Detroit and working-class Macomb County.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 25, 2026

As Berenger and Rogers are drawn into an affair, Scott plays up the contrast between her wealthy Upper East Side world and his working-class life in an outer borough.

From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 20, 2026

Meanwhile, Blanca had organized a network for obtaining provisions through the black-market and her contacts in the working-class neighborhood where she went to teach ceramics to the women.

From "The House of the Spirits: A Novel" by Isabel Allende