Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

Her own origins were lower middle class, petit bourgeois: she had an uncle who was a doctor—the star of the family—but neither of her parents had gone to university.

From The New Yorker • Nov. 27, 2016

As critic David Thistlewood noted in Back to Postmodernity, in Polke’s critical rendering of a bird that had been “readily absorbed into the petit bourgeois domestic idyll, with its smug sense of being home-made”.

From The Guardian • Jun. 24, 2015

As a would-be expat, scornful of Pudding Island and its drab inhabitants, Larry liked nothing more than to épater un petit bourgeois.

From The Guardian • Feb. 10, 2012

One page later she is deriding this caviar and Champagne celebration as “our petit bourgeois feast” and saying that “we wanted to live the living life,” whatever that is.

From New York Times • Mar. 21, 2010

Fortunately the "petit bourgeois" gained his point, and the preservation of Belfort to France was the one drop of comfort in that sea of misery.

From Holidays in Eastern France by Betham-Edwards, Matilda