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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

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

Not all data point to an improvement for the working class.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 23, 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

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

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

In the video, uploaded to a Russian recruitment account, Townsend described himself as "a normal working-class lad from Yorkshire".

From BBC ● Aug. 24, 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

You might say, Okay, but when has a working-class Indian-American girl with a kooky dadi and ripped jeans ever become a famous filmmaker?

From "From Twinkle, with Love" by Sandhya Menon