the quality

== English == === Alternative forms === the Quality === Etymology === From quality (“high social position”). === Pronunciation === === Noun === the quality pl (plural only) (UK, idiomatic, archaic) The upper class, the high society, the gentry; the people of quality. 20 July 1713, Joseph Addison, The Guardian I shall appear at the masquerade dressed up in my feathers, that the quality may see how pretty they will look in their travelling habits. 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: 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. ==== Translations ==== === References === “the quality”, Dictionary of Idiomatic English Phrases by James Main Dixon, 1891, p. 262 (facsimile).