/ˈbʊərʒwɑː/
[adjective] Relating to the middle class, especially people who care a lot about money, social status, and owning things. It is often used in a critical way to describe someone who has very conventional, comfortable values.
The word 'bourgeois' traces back to a simple fortified town — being middle class was originally just about living inside city walls.
The story of 'bourgeois' begins with walls. The word descends from the Late Latin 'burgus', meaning a fortified town or fortress, a term that Romans borrowed from a Germanic root related to the Old High German 'burg', meaning a defended settlement. This is the same ancient root that gives us English words like 'borough' and 'burg'. In the early medieval world, a 'burgus' was simply a place where people lived under the protection of walls — and whoever lived there was defined by that geography.
From Late Latin 'burgus', the word passed into Old French as 'bourg', meaning a town or market town. From 'bourg' came 'bourgeois', which in medieval France referred quite literally to a free person who lived in a town — not a peasant tied to the land, and not a nobleman born to privilege, but someone in between. These town-dwellers were merchants, craftsmen, and traders. The French word 'bourgeoisie' (from 'bourgeois' + the collective suffix '-ie') then named this group as a social class. English borrowed 'bourgeois' directly from French in the 16th century, keeping both its spelling and its social meaning.
For centuries, the term was largely neutral — it simply described the urban middle class. But the French Revolution of 1789 charged the word with political electricity. The bourgeoisie rose against the aristocracy, and suddenly the word was at the center of fierce arguments about power, wealth, and who deserved to rule society. The middle class had become a historical force, and 'bourgeois' was their label.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels then gave the word its sharpest political edge. In 'The Communist Manifesto' of 1848, they used 'bourgeois' to describe the class of people who owned the means of production — factories, businesses, capital — in contrast to the 'proletariat', the working class who sold their labour. For Marx, the bourgeoisie were not simply comfortable town-dwellers; they were the dominant class in a system built on exploitation. This usage spread far beyond academic economics and became part of everyday political language across the world.
In modern English, 'bourgeois' carries a slightly different flavour depending on who uses it. In everyday speech, it often means smugly conventional, obsessed with material comfort, or snobbish in a very ordinary way — the person who cares more about their kitchen renovation than about ideas. It can be used playfully or as a genuine insult. The journey from 'someone who lives inside a town wall' to 'someone too attached to their nice things' is a remarkable one, tracking centuries of social change, revolution, and the complex anxieties the middle class has always inspired in those above and below them.