"the quality" meaning in English

See the quality in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Audio: En-au-the quality.ogg [Australia]
Etymology: From quality (“high social position”). Etymology templates: {{m|en|quality|t=high social position}} quality (“high social position”) Head templates: {{en-noun|p}} the quality pl (plural only)
  1. (UK, idiomatic, archaic) The upper class, the high society, the gentry; the people of quality. Tags: UK, archaic, idiomatic, plural, plural-only Categories (topical): Collectives Synonyms: the Quality Translations (upper class): yläluokka (Finnish), säätyläistö (Finnish)

Alternative forms

Download JSON data for the quality meaning in English (3.6kB)

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  "etymology_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "en",
        "2": "quality",
        "t": "high social position"
      },
      "expansion": "quality (“high social position”)",
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  "etymology_text": "From quality (“high social position”).",
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  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
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          "kind": "other",
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          "kind": "topical",
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          "parents": [
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          "source": "w"
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      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "text": "20 July 1713, Joseph Addison, The Guardian\nI shall appear at the masquerade dressed up in my feathers, that the quality may see how pretty they will look in their travelling habits."
        },
        {
          "ref": "1887, The, Athenaeum, p. 445",
          "text": "The rector kept open house on that day, but by degrees the “quality” gave up going, and the fair, of course, became disreputable, till at last it was put down as a nuisance.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1970, James Gordon Farrell, Troubles, 1st edition, page 34",
          "text": "[In 1919 Ireland.] ‘Be quiet, Ripon! It's not nonsense at all. Ripon's father calls us “fish-eaters” and “Holy Romans” and so on. So does Ripon. So will you, Major, when you're among the “quality”. In fact, you'll become a member of the “quality” yourself, high and mighty, too good for the rest of us.’",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2006, James Alan Downie, \"Who Says She's a Bourgeois Writer? Reconsidering the Social and Political Contexts of Jane Austen's Novels\", in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 40, Nr. 1, Fall 2006",
          "text": "Yet they did not pretend to be members of ‘the quality’, the people of fashion, the cosmopolitan beau monde or the ton, although they were not above harping on their exalted acquaintances among the nobility or the antiquity of their lineage when they saw fit."
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "The upper class, the high society, the gentry; the people of quality."
      ],
      "id": "en-the_quality-en-noun-e~2RJGV~",
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          "quality",
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      "raw_glosses": [
        "(UK, idiomatic, archaic) The upper class, the high society, the gentry; the people of quality."
      ],
      "synonyms": [
        {
          "word": "the Quality"
        }
      ],
      "tags": [
        "UK",
        "archaic",
        "idiomatic",
        "plural",
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      "translations": [
        {
          "code": "fi",
          "lang": "Finnish",
          "sense": "upper class",
          "word": "yläluokka"
        },
        {
          "code": "fi",
          "lang": "Finnish",
          "sense": "upper class",
          "word": "säätyläistö"
        }
      ]
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      "mp3_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/d/d6/En-au-the_quality.ogg/En-au-the_quality.ogg.mp3",
      "ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/En-au-the_quality.ogg",
      "tags": [
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  "word": "the quality"
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      "expansion": "quality (“high social position”)",
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        {
          "text": "20 July 1713, Joseph Addison, The Guardian\nI shall appear at the masquerade dressed up in my feathers, that the quality may see how pretty they will look in their travelling habits."
        },
        {
          "ref": "1887, The, Athenaeum, p. 445",
          "text": "The rector kept open house on that day, but by degrees the “quality” gave up going, and the fair, of course, became disreputable, till at last it was put down as a nuisance.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1970, James Gordon Farrell, Troubles, 1st edition, page 34",
          "text": "[In 1919 Ireland.] ‘Be quiet, Ripon! It's not nonsense at all. Ripon's father calls us “fish-eaters” and “Holy Romans” and so on. So does Ripon. So will you, Major, when you're among the “quality”. In fact, you'll become a member of the “quality” yourself, high and mighty, too good for the rest of us.’",
          "type": "quotation"
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        {
          "ref": "2006, James Alan Downie, \"Who Says She's a Bourgeois Writer? Reconsidering the Social and Political Contexts of Jane Austen's Novels\", in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 40, Nr. 1, Fall 2006",
          "text": "Yet they did not pretend to be members of ‘the quality’, the people of fashion, the cosmopolitan beau monde or the ton, although they were not above harping on their exalted acquaintances among the nobility or the antiquity of their lineage when they saw fit."
        }
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      "glosses": [
        "The upper class, the high society, the gentry; the people of quality."
      ],
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          "upper class",
          "upper class"
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        [
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          "high society"
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        [
          "quality",
          "quality"
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        "(UK, idiomatic, archaic) The upper class, the high society, the gentry; the people of quality."
      ],
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        "UK",
        "archaic",
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      "tags": [
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  "synonyms": [
    {
      "word": "the Quality"
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  ],
  "translations": [
    {
      "code": "fi",
      "lang": "Finnish",
      "sense": "upper class",
      "word": "yläluokka"
    },
    {
      "code": "fi",
      "lang": "Finnish",
      "sense": "upper class",
      "word": "säätyläistö"
    }
  ],
  "word": "the quality"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-12 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (ae36afe and 304864d). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.