Browse phrases beginning with:
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The great unwashed
Meaning
The common, lower classes; the hoi-polloi.
Origin
This rather disparaging term was coined by the Victorian novelist and playwright Edward Bulwer-Lytton. He used it in his 1830 novel Paul Clifford:
"He is certainly a man who bathes and ‘lives cleanly’, (two especial charges preferred against him by Messrs. the Great Unwashed)."
See also, it was a dark and stormy night.