Bourgeois

How to spell bourgeois

9 letters · 2 syllables

30 of the 60 people asked to spell bourgeois in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

The most common mistake is bourgeouis. The letters people get wrong are highlighted.

bourgeouis bourgeois

What people typed instead

• bourgeouis6 people
• bourgeoise3 people

How to pronounce bourgeois

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bourgeois mean?

1. adjectiveCharacteristic of the conventional middle class, especially in being materialistic or preoccupied with respectability.
2. nounA member of the middle class, typically viewed in terms of property ownership and conventional attitudes.

Bourgeois in a sentence

• adjective

  Critics dismissed the film as a bourgeois fantasy about wealthy homeowners.

• noun

  The political pamphlet contrasted the worker with the property-owning bourgeois.

• adjective

  He mocked their bourgeois obsession with matching furniture and dinner parties.

• noun

  As a comfortable suburban bourgeois, he rarely questioned his own privileges.

Where does bourgeois come from?

Language of origin: French

This word comes straight from French, where bourgeois meant a citizen or freeman of a bourg, that is, a walled market town. The root bourg traces back to the Late Latin burgus, meaning a fortified town or castle, which itself was borrowed from a Germanic word for a fortified place (the same ancestor that gives us the -burg and -borough in place names). In medieval society a bourgeois was a town-dwelling merchant or tradesman, ranking below the nobility but above the rural peasantry. English adopted the term in the 1500s, and over time, especially through later social and political writing, it took on the extra flavour of middle-class respectability, comfort, and conventional materialism. The spelling stays stubbornly French: the silent letters, the -geois ending pronounced 'zhwah', and the unusual ou cluster are all preserved unchanged, which is exactly what makes it such a memorable trap.

How the word is built

• bourg (town, from Late Latin burgus 'fortified town')
• -eois (French suffix forming an adjective/noun meaning 'belonging to')

People who misspell bourgeois also struggle with

Of the Spelling Garden players who got bourgeois wrong the first time, this is how many also got each of these wrong.

• connoisseur 77% of them got it wrong
• idiosyncrasy 76% of them got it wrong
• reconnaissance 59% of them got it wrong