Class
(pronounced klas or klahs)
(1) A
number of persons or things regarded as forming a group by reason of common
attributes, characteristics, qualities, or traits; kind; sort.
(2) A
collection or division of people or things sharing a common characteristic,
attribute, quality, or property
(3) A group
of persons sharing a similar social position and certain economic, political,
and cultural characteristics
(4) In
educational use: (1) The period during which a group of students meets for
instruction, (2) A group of students meeting regularly to study a subject under
the guidance of a teacher or (3) the physical classroom.
(5) Collectively
(as “class of YYYY”), all students in the institution who graduated that year,
the concept extended also to politicians in an assembly all elected at the same
election.
(6) A
social stratum sharing basic economic, political, or cultural characteristics,
and having the same social position; caste.
(7) In
sociology, political science & economics, the system of dividing society on
that basis; (ruling class, upper class, middle class, working class etc); of
late extended to include concepts such as “political class”, “entrepreneurial
class”, “creative class” etc; in Marxist theory, a group of persons sharing the
same relationship to the means of production & distribution.
(8) Social
rank, especially high rank.
(9) Elegance,
grace, or dignity, as in dress and behavior.
(10) The
members of a given group in society, regarded as a single entity.
(11) Any
division of persons or things according to rank or grade.
(12) Excellence;
possessing exceptional merit; in informal use, the best or among the best of
its kind (sometimes as “touch of class”).
(13) In Hinduism,
any of the four social divisions, the Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaisya, and Shudra,
of Hindu society; varna.
(14) Any of
several grades of accommodation available on ships, airplanes, trains and such.
(15) In biology,
the usual major subdivision of a phylum or division in the classification of
organisms, usually consisting of several orders.
(16) In British
and Commonwealth universities, the groups into which candidates for honors
degrees are divided according to merit on the basis of final examinations or
other method of assessment (first class, second class, third class and
sometimes graduated (class 2A, 2B etc).
(17) In Ecclesiastical
use (early Methodism, as classis), one of several small companies, each
composed of about twelve members under a leader, into which each society or
congregation was divided.
(18) In statistics,
a grouping of data values in an interval, often used for computation of a
frequency distribution.
(19) In
mathematics (set theory), a collection of sets definable by a shared property,
especially one which is not itself a set (in which case the class is called proper). To please the nerds, every set is a class,
but classes are not generally sets. A
class that is not a set is called a proper class.
(20) In
computer programming (object-oriented), a set of objects having the same
behavior (but typically differing in state), or a template defining such a set
in terms of its common properties, functions etc.
(21) To
place or arrange in a class; classify; to take or have a place in a particular
class.
(22) As “class
up” to improve the quality, tone, or status of; add elegance, dignity, style
etc.
1590–1600:
From the earlier Middle English classis
(plural classes), from the fourteenth century French classis, from the Latin classis
(a class or division of the people, assembly of people, the whole body of
citizens called to arms, the army, the fleet, later a class or division in
general, the singular form a back formation from the plural), from the
primitive Indo-European kele- (to
call, shout). Classis displaced the Old
English ġecynd. The original use in the late sixteenth
century was of a “group of students” (ie number of pupils in a school or
college of the same grade) and that in North America became the standard form,
enduring to this day. The Latin classis was most used in military
matters (of the army and the sea-fleet) and applied particularly to “a class, a
division; army, fleet”, especially “any one of the six orders into which
Servius Tullius (sixth king of Rome, reigning 578-535 BC) divided the Roman
people for purposes of taxation” (traditionally, originally “the people of Rome
under arms” (a sense in use in English by at least the 1650s), and akin to calare (to call (to arms)), thus the
link with the primitive Indo-European kele-
(to call, shout)). Class is the standard
abbreviation of classification and sometimes is used also for “classical” and “classified”. The word is for many purposes used as a
modifier and there are more than a hundred including asset class, business class, closed class, economy class, first class,
leisure class, middle class, night class, professional class, school class,
social class, working class. class action, type class, cruiser class, cattle
class, class A, classable, class-based, class-conscious, classicide, classism,
classist, class warrior, creative class, criminal class, high-class, low class, pseudoclass, ruling class, working-class,
class enemy, class struggle and class reunion.
The
19BB (“Barrier Boat”, though sailor's slang is “Boomin’ Beaver”) is a
specialized class of miniature tugboat used to deploy and maintain port
security booms surrounding Navy ships and installations in port. The smallest vessels on the USN's (US Navy)
active list, the story Donald Trump (b 1946; POTUS 2017-2021 and since 2025)
wanted to rename the BBs “Biden Class” (after Joe Biden (b 1942; VPOTUS
2009-2017 & POTUS 2021-2025)) apparently apocryphal.
Borrowing
from the concept of classifications in educational & military use, the
adoption in science for taxonomy (group of related plants or animals) dates
from 1753 and has since been much expanded.
Dictionaries, perhaps surprisingly cite the 1870s as the origin of class
being used with the meaning “high quality”, despite the sense of “a division of
society according to status” (upper, lower, etc.) being in use since the early
1700s and the idea in societies of a “class-consciousness” will be ancient
although it was only in 1903 the term entered English, from the German compound
noun Klassenbewusst. Special adaptations include the nouns classeme (in semiotics a generic or
contextual seme, denoting a group of objects) & classitis (in web design, a critique of authoring stylesheets with
redundant and semantically unhelpful classes).
Classy endures as an adjective (meaning “elegant; stylish) but the noun classy (also as clashee & clashy) is
long obsolete. Under the Raj, a classy
(from khalasi) was an Indian worker
at a port or dockyard, traditionally employed in pulling vessels out of the
water for maintenance and repair and returning them to the water upon
completion; the anglicized forms came ultimately from the Hindi ख़लासी (xalāsī), from the Classical Persian خلاصی
(xalāsī). Class is a noun, verb & adjective,
classism & classer are nouns, classist & classful are nouns &
adjectives, classable, classy, classless & classlike are adjectives,
declass is an adjective, classed is a verb, classing is a noun & verb,
classwide is an adjective & adverb and classward is an adverb; the noun
plural is classes
Classy look: Lindsay Lohan rendered in the style of nineteenth century
Impressionism by Gemini.ai. The digital version was based on a photograph of her in a
Jil Sander (b 1943)
gown while attending the Disney Legends Awards ceremony, Anaheim, California, August, 2024. On the day, although the environment was not optimized for photography, the light and even the breeze cooperated, the gown’s fabric
swishing in a way the Impressionists would have painted, even had the air been still.
In the
context of a group of people sharing the same social, economic, or occupational
status, the term “class” implies usually a social and economic hierarchy in
which those of higher class standing have greater status, privilege, prestige,
and authority. Western societies traditionally have been divided into three
classes: the upper (or leisure), middle (bourgeoisie) & lower (working)
class (for Marxists, the significant classes were the bourgeoisie and
proletariat although neo-Marxists have for decades adjusted the theory to
accommodate changes). Most associated
with the writings of English-born US sociologist Michael Mann (b 1942), classicide
(the construct being class + (hom)icide) describes the deliberate and
systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of a social class through
persecution and violence. In that it may
be compared to genocide (envisaged originally as the mass killing of defined
ethnic or religious groups). Between the
two there can be overlap (such as in the Cambodian genocide by the Khmer Rouge
regime in Democratic Kampuchea) but the emphasise in classicide is on the premeditated
mass killing of a group based on their (perceived) social status; in that its
similar to politicide (in which the targets are defined by their political
activity) but in that case, the critical factor was what people do rather than
what they are. Very much at the heart of
the French Revolution (1989), classicide was a feature of the “terrible
twentieth century” and events able to be classified as such occurred in the
Soviet Union under comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953), during
the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) in the PRC (People's Republic of China) under
comrade Chairman Mao Zedong (1893–1976; chairman of the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP) & paramount leader of the PRC 1949-1976) and in Kampuchea under Pol
Pot (Saloth Sâr; 1925–1998; dictator the communist (Maoist) state of Democratic
Kampuchea (Cambodia) 1975-1979). The
related “social cleansing” (the removal of certain classes from certain places
but (in theory) not involving mass killing) has the same relationship to classicide
as ethnic cleansing has to genocide.
USS
Defiant, the lead ship in the proposed Trump Class of guided missile cruisers to enter service in the 1930s.
The design has little in common with the historic battleships of the twentieth century but it's believed President Trump is drawn to the word "battleship" because they were the "biggest warships" he calls the Trump Class "battleships". The future of surface fleets and their configurations is currently the subject of much discussion on the basis the likelihood of threats from massed swarms of autonomous or controlled UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles (
drones)) may render them too vulnerable to risk.
With
machines, “class” came to be used of a “type” or “run” of units of similar
(though not necessarily identical) units.
The practice pre-dated mass-production of consumer goods (on the model
Henry Ford’s Ford (1863-1947) Model T (1908-1927) made famous) and most
influential was the UK’s Royal Navy that in the 1870s & 1880s standardized
the use of “class” for designs of capital ships, the convention being the name
adopted was the first laid down (and usually, though not always,
launched). By the time of the coming of
the upsurge in warship construction that marked the naval “arms race” of the
early twentieth century, naval architects in many nations had adopted the
scheme of designation. The “class”
referred not to a ship’s “type” but the set of design parameters (dimensions,
weight, firepower, propulsion etc) distinguishing the ships from others. With the smaller warships (destroyers, light
cruisers etc), there might be a dozen or more of the class while the big ships
(battleships, battlecruisers etc) typically were built in batches of no more
than four and the occasional class did consist of a single vessel. Because it was an “arms race”, ships could be
approaching obsolescence not long after being launched and succeeding classes
incorporated new innovations and, in the case of the battleships: more of
everything, the most famous example being the Royal Navy’s Dreadnought, the
first “all big-gun” battleship that rendered obsolete every battleship then
afloat (including all others in the British fleets).
HMS Temeraire at anchor, 1909. She was one of three Bellerophon-class Dreadnought battleships built between 1906-1909, all of which survived World War I (1914-1918) and were scrapped in 1921-1922.
Before navies
crystallised the system of “class” warships had tended to be described by
“rate” or “type” (first-rate ship of the line, frigate, corvette, etc) but
individual names were invoked, phrases such as “ships of the Iron Duke type” or “the Majestic battleships” being common in oral use and routine in
Admiralty documents. So the concept of
“classes” had crept in before the system was formalized and, in the late 1800s,
it was three factors that encouraged the shift: (1) Industrialised naval
construction (steam power, iron and steel hulls and increasingly capable
machine tools made designs expensive meaning a run of standardized units was a
way to amortize the investment), (2) Serial production (with an arms race in
progress, navies were ordering more warships and, as Henry Ford soon would
demonstrate, batches of machines with identical (or near-identical)
specifications could be produced faster and more cheaply than bespoke creations
and (3) Navies were becoming more bureaucratic (as the fleets expanded, so did
the establishment & dockyard facilities and, with ships becoming more
complex and maintenance intensive, Admiralties needed precise accounting,
training, logistics, and doctrinal categorisation. “Class” already had a long history in engineering
(especially in railway workshops) and taxonomy so was the natural
administrative solution and at the time, Britain was the world’s leading naval
power so, as went the Royal Navy, others followed.
Classes on four wheels
BMW
promotional shot of 1964 BMW 1800 Neue
Klasse.
The monument in the
background is the Siegestor (Victory
Gate), located on the on the boundary between the districts of Maxvorstadt &
Schwabing in Munich, Bavaria Germany. Completed
in 1852, it was commissioned by Ludwig I (1786–1868; King of Bavaria 1825-1848)
to honor the Bavarian army but after suffering severe damage in World War II
(1939-1945), it only narrowly avoided demolition. BMW stands for Bayerische Motoren Werke (Bavarian Motor Works) and the company has
been based in Barvaria since formation in 1910.
As body
types and other forms of differentiation proliferated in the twentieth century,
cars were often sorted into “classes”, variously by manufacturers, dealers,
registration authorities or reviewers.
The categories used from time to time numbered in the dozens but literal
use of the word “class” has been rare in formal nomenclature although terms
like “the 1.5 litre class” or “the family
car class” were and remain common.
BMW’s Neue Klasse (1962-1970)
became well-known outside Germany as the company’s first “mainstream” product
on four wheels BMW and although always appearing in English as “New Class”, the
literal translation of Neuse Klasse is
“new cash register”; given the significance of the range in restoring the
company to profitability (in 1960 it was a loss-making concern on the verge of
being sold to avoid a declaration of bankruptcy) and ensuring its survival, the
true meaning wholly is appropriate.
BMW’s Neue Klasse’s range was
neither innovative or especially distinctive but was well-executed and the
specification was perfect for the a point in the Wirtschaftswunder (the post-war “economic miracle” experienced by
the FRG (Bundesrepublik Deutschland
(Federal Republic of Germany; the old West Germany, 1949-1990))) at which a critical
mass of the middle class had become sufficiently prosperous to trade in their
Volkswagen Beetle for something “a class above”, just as a decade earlier
they’d shifted from a motorcycle to one of the “microcars” built by BMW and
others that had in the 1950s “put Germany
back on wheels”.
BMW 1800 TI/SA, 1965 24 Hour Race, Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps, Francorchamps, Stavelot, Wallonia, Belgium.
The Neue Klasse tag was never used by BMW;
the cars always given a designation based on engine displacement (1500; 1600;
1800; 2000) and the range was important also as the ancestor of the 3 Series,
since 1975 the model that internationally has been the backbone of the
company’s sales. The model was noted too
for it being the first time a “Hofmeister Kink” appeared on a BMW; although the
motif had been seen for more than a decade in both Europe and the US, it became
such a brand signature it came to be named after Wilhelm Hofmeister (1912–1978),
BMW’s design chief 1955-1970. Although
in the 1960s the company never Neue
Klasse part of its corporate language, so enduring did it become that in
the 2020s it’s its latest generation of EVs (electric vehicle) is now
officially the BMW Neue Klasse. With Chinese manufacturing of EVs seemingly a
juggernaut and thus facing troubles potentially as serious those the original Neue Klasse surmounted, the Bavarians
hope history repeats itself.
Mercedes-Benz W116, the first S-Class: 1976 450 SEL 6.9.
Unlike BMW,
Mercedes Benz did with the release of the W116 (1972-1980) sedans formalize
use, the S Class (Sonderklasse,
sometimes abbreviated as S-Klasse and
translated as “Special Class”) the first instance of what would later became a
convention (S Class, E Class, C Class etc).
The new name also encouraged retrospective use, the earlier “big” sedans
(W111/112 (1959-1968) & W108/109 (1965-1972)) also sometimes referred to
thus although this was never adopted by the factory. A landmark achievement in its time, the original S-Class was the first recognizably "modern" Mercedes-Benz sedan and its design elements would be carried forward for two decades.
Mercedes-Benz advertising. Although never explicitly labelling previous models as "S-Class", the factory does like to to hint and frankly, by 2026, the past was looking better than the future.
Despite that, Mercedes-Benz has in S-Class
advertising (the model now in its seventh generation, the W223 introduced in
2020) often shown an array of previous generations of its “big” sedans including
models like the W111/112 & W108/109 which, in period, never carried the
designation and even the 600 (W100, 1963-1981), a model in the Grosser rather than S-Class lineage. Although as early as 1968, a
distinct range of smaller sedans had augmented the W108/109, (the range
expanded further in 1983 by an even more compact model), the now familiar
nomenclature (C Class, E Class, S Class) wasn’t standardized until 1993 when
the alphanumeric names were inverted (500E becoming E500 etc), a change
necessitated by the proliferation of models rendering the old system (dating
from the 1920s) so prone to ambiguity it has become unmanageable.
Newspapers,
advertisers and readers
Before the
internet did what it did, for centuries it was print publications (newspapers,
magazines and other periodicals) that were the prime vector for the
distribution of news, information and entertainment; film, radio and television
all had their effects (television notably contributing to the extinction of
most afternoon newspapers) but generally, much of the established print media
and what was then the “new media” managed a form of peaceful co-existence that
was sometimes synergistic, newspaper proprietors and editors quickly expanding
their coverage of what appeared on television because that was what their
readers wanted, some buying the copies for no other reason. In those jurisdictions that allowed the same
corporation to publish newspapers and operate television stations in the same
market, the techniques of cross-promotion became highly refined.
Unlike many mass-produced products, selling more newspapers did not necessarily increase profits; it was a matter of what class of readers were attracted.
Newspapers
and magazines were historically unusual because the cover (or even subscription)
price charged often would not be enough to pay for the paper alone, let alone
the overall cost of production & distribution. What covered the costs and provided centuries
of sometimes vast profits was advertising revenue and although readers tended
to think of themselves as buying “a product”, in reality they were the product
being delivered to advertisers, exactly the same strategy that works so well for
Facebook, TikTok etc. However, an
additional layer of complexity for the print media was that unlike a
manufacturer of widgets, increasing sales did not always translate to greater
profits. It’s true the accountants at
the widget factory also had to calculate if the extent of additional demand
made worthwhile an investment in increased production (ie a night shift, an
additional production line or factory etc) but one simplicity was that every
dollar paid by a widget buyer (rich or poor) translated on the balance sheet in
the same way. What made print titles
unusual was not all buyers were created equal and while the dollars paid by
poor people for their newspapers were banked in the same way and had the same
nominal value, they weren’t of necessity “worth having” because selling
newspapers to the poor (ie of a lower socio-economic class) could be
counter-productive for the business model (ie the more you sold to them, the
greater the loss).
In the
West, mainstream newspapers by the mid twentieth century had become polarized,
the “popular” (ie tabloid) titles at one end and the “quality” press (ie
broadsheet) at the other. Because commercial
success depended on being able to deliver to advertisers the “right” readers,
an industry of market research emerged to perfect the analysis of working out
which titles delivered the “right
audience at the lowest cost”. This
research was both quantitative & qualitative because it mattered much to advertising
agencies whether a title’s buyer lived in the south east, owned two cars,
played golf on Saturdays and took an annual overseas holiday or lived in the north, took the
bus to a football match on Saturdays and never left the country. In many ways, they were separate populations and while both demographics might be attractive to
those wishing to advertise products, in many cases they’d be
different products and in some, exclusive to each. By combining this
data with advertising rates, agencies were able to work out for their clients
which media (print, radio, television etc) could deliver the desired market
segment at the cheapest rates. In the
case of national newspapers, the segmentation that mattered most was social
class and what evolved in the UK was a metric to handle these calculations. Developed by the industry collective, JICNARS
(Joint Industry Committee for National Readership Surveys, a body owned jointly
by publishers, advertisers & agencies), because the occupation of a
household’s main breadwinner (chief earner) largely determined the spending
pattern of that household, social class was determined primarily the their jobs
and for this purpose there were six classes:
Class A: The upper middle class (by the mid
1970s in the UK around 20% of all households) with the chief earner (head of
the household) typically a successful businessman, professional (lawyer,
doctor, chartered accountant etc) or senior civil servant, living in a large
detached house or high-priced apartment.
At the time, that class included headmasters of large public (ie
private) schools, executives near board level in large companies,
leading figures in local
government, newspaper editors, senior journalists, professors and Church of
England bishops. As that list indicates,
by the 2020s, the composition of Class A shifted a bet. For the JICNARS’s purposes, the “upper class”
(the so-called “1%”) were included in Class A.
Class B: The middle class, then some 10% of
households. These were often people
holding “senior” positions who were financially stable and living lives of
“quiet respectability” and although with neither the incomes or accumulated
wealth (or, not infrequently, debt) of the Class A members, the significance
was that in manners and cultural matters, their tastes and habits often
overlapped, meaning their attention was sought by the same advertisers. The Class B membership included vicars,
headmasters of smaller schools, senior executive officers in the civil service,
university lecturers, matrons of smaller hospitals, pharmacists, directors of smaller
companies and qualified librarians in charge of smaller libraries.
Class C1: Just over 15% of households, the C1
families were the lower middle class, trades-people (employed or self-employed)
and non-manual workers, “white-collar” workers such as articled clerks, owners
of small businesses, clerks, typists, telephonists, curates and nurses. A recent trend has been a marginalisation of
the white collar component of the C1s by a number of factors, most obviously
technology although this is spreading upwards to B and even A more than
downwards. Of the trades, despite recent
rises in their economic value to advertisers, they’re considered culturally
static so while their purchasing power has increased, they don’t identify with
AB tastes.
Class C2: Intriguingly, many of those in
Class C2 (about a quarter of households) enjoyed higher incomes than many in
the C1 cohort and this was because, as the skilled working class, their
economic value was higher because they contributed directly (and measurably) to
productivity in a way an accountant’s clerk did not. The C2 membership included foremen, fitters,
knitters, plumbers, shop assistants with supervisory responsibilities, pastry-cooks
and prison officers.
Class D: Although it probably wasn’t true
statistically, for the purposes of the JICNARS, those is Class D were
considered all manual workers, semi-skilled or unskilled; that didn’t mean the
latter had no skills, it meant to an economist those skills could be quickly
learned and required no formal education or structured training. Some 20% of households were in Class D and typical
employment profiles would include labourers, fishermen, bus conductors, traffic
wardens and window cleaners.
Class E: Some 10% of households, the Es operated
at the “lowest level of subsistence”
and survived through precarious, low-paid employment, petty crime and transfer
payments; they would now be classed as “welfare-dependent”. Although the membership was diverse, the
JICNARS for illustrative purposes listed migrants, those with substance abuse
issues, families of old age pensioners, widows and those dependent on social
security.
Predictably,
the 30%-odd of the population in Class A & Class B tended to buy the
“quality” papers, titles like the Financial Times, The Times, The Daily Telegraph
and The Guardian collectively drawing almost half their readership from the
ABs, this declining to around 40% for the Sunday editions. What this affluent readership did was attract high-priced
advertising, enabling the titles to remain profitable despite a low cover price
and circulations that were tiny compared with the mass-market tabloids. Of note too is that it was these publications
(along with The Economist (a newspaper that looks like a glossy magazine) that
were most read by decision makers in government and industry. So, it was the quality newspapers that tended
to provide informed discussion on public issues, political affairs, business
and the arts; although the record of their influence on public policy was
patchy, what they tended to do was “set the agenda”, another attraction for
advertisers.
What made
the pre-internet newspaper business unusual was that there was sometimes a
conscious attempt to reduce sales, a discussion usually not heard in boardrooms
or among members of management committees.
In 1968, The Times had embarked on a major promotional drive and, using
conventional techniques, sales indeed did spike and that was most pleasing
until the research revealed some 60% of its readers were now in the undesirable
C1, C2, D & E classes, something the advertising agencies to quick to
notice. Accordingly, the paper’s editorial
direction shifted back, ensuring as many as possible of the intruders were shed
and the bias towards the AB was restored.
Profitability was thus also improved because with each copy of The Times
sold at a nominal loss (based on the cost of production & distribution),
selling more made sense only if the rising readership attracted more high-value
advertising. With the less desired
classes forming a majority of the leadership, not only were the traditional
advertisers less attracted, those seeking to reach the C1, C2 and D classes
(few except tobacco companies and their ilk chased the E class) were not willing to pay the high-rates
charged by the Times. The Times did not
repeat the mistake and that different news appeared in different papers to
attract different audiences was hardly surprising for as Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)
put it in Scoop (1938): “They all have
different policies, so of course they have to give different news.”
Nye Bevan and his wife Jennie Lee (1904–1988), London, 1934.
Waugh’s
point of course can be considered as a matter of both cause and effect because
whatever might happen on a publications profit & loss statement, there are
also political consequences. Until
scared off, more than one government in the post-war years proposed increasing public
expenditure in a way that would increase the burden only on taxpayers earning 2-3 times the national
average and, without exception, these have been criticized by the “quality”
press, usually on the basis not of such a fiscal package being “unfair” but
that it would “alienate the political
centre”. As the JICNARS understood,
in electoral terms, this was highly improbable because only about 10-12% of the
population would lose out in such a redistribution but that sliver of the
electorate was in the AB Class at the centre of the quality press’s readership
and this dictated the response. In his
book In Place of Fear (1952), the Welsh
Labour Party politician Aneurin "Nye" Bevan (1897–1960) pondered: “How can wealth
persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here
lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the twentieth century.” As political parties came to understand, it
was possible to convince the poor to vote against their own economic interests
if the “culture wars” dangled before
their eyes could be made to seem enough of a threat, thus the weaponization in
the US of guns, God, pickup trucks, trans rights, abortion, gay marriage and
much else.
