landed gentry
2
9.3
- noun
- UK
:
nobleza terrateniente
- The anonymous Ulster man may well have sprung from landed gentry stock.
Examples
-
Most church income came from the revenue of its estates and the patronage of landed gentry.
Academic text (1999) -
And that's something the landed gentry can't digest.
-
It's no wonder that so many of the leaders of the Revolution were landed gentry.
Blog text (24) -
We, the families, big with our new sense of ourselves as landed gentry, sat around our tables after dinner and discussed such things.
Fiction book (1994) -
Elizabeth Bowen was born into the landed gentry.
Academic text (2000) -
But in the interim, there was a huge transfer of wealth from the cities and bankrupted vets to the landed gentry.
Blog text (3) -
Conrad, like Nabokov, was fluent in French, since it was the language the Russian and Polish landed gentry spoke.
Academic text (2010) -
Despite her public role as rural landed gentry and political involvement, Lister's coded diary, sexual fantasies, and landscaping projects reveal her desire for privacy.
Academic text (2005) -
My mother was not one of them because her family had come from three centuries of landed gentry. Yes, oh, money earned and amounted, then inherited and divided, then lost, so only land remained—plenty of that. Property poor they became, landed gentry, or swamp Yankees.
Fiction book (1991) -
Many members of the landed gentry maintained their wealth through agricultural estates and rental income.
Synonyms
14
8.4
People of high social rank, often landowners below the nobles
A group of country landowners who form the local ruling class
Antonyms
How Privileged
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly and transparently derived from 'landed' (owning land/estates) modifying 'gentry' (a social class); together they compose the predictable sense of gentry who own land and live off rental income. This modifier+noun pattern is a straightforward, cross-linguistically common construction, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents would readily infer the MWE's meaning.
Etymology
Landed gentry comes from a simple picture: families who literally owned large areas of land and lived in big country houses. The word landed shows they had land, and gentry were people of high social rank who did not work but lived on money from rent, so the phrase means 'people who own land and live from its income'.