How to Use plebeian in a Sentence

plebeian

1 of 2 noun
  • The second-class plebeians worked the farms, baked the bread and built the walls.
    — Bret Stetka, Scientific American, 11 Oct. 2019
  • Which is, 99 percent of us plebeians need to pick a new hobby.
    — Elise Taylor, Vogue, 25 Oct. 2017
  • How could the bookseller trust two random plebeians off the street?
    — Literary Hub, 16 Dec. 2025
  • For us plebeians, riding a ski resort gondola means adhering to a lengthy set of rules.
    — Frederick Dreier, Outside Online, 24 Sep. 2024
  • That is because the Roman Forum began as a market and became the place where patricians would meet plebeians and press the flesh.
    — Ron Grossman, chicagotribune.com, 26 Mar. 2018
  • Snob is an 18th-century term for a cobbler's apprentice and, by extension, for plebeians in general, like me.
    — P.j. O'Rourke, Town & Country, 15 Sep. 2016
  • Duckbill is the latest company that wants to make a personal assistant available to us plebeians, starting at $99 a month.
    — BostonGlobe.com, 13 Sep. 2023
  • The plebeians have plenty to be furious about, but their representatives, skilled at turning a crowd into a mob, seem hellbent on shoring up their own influence.
    — Theater Critic, Los Angeles Times, 1 July 2026
  • Running dreams, for runners and plebeians nonrunners alike, are totally common and take myriad forms with boundless interpretations.
    — Grace Perry, Outside Online, 10 Apr. 2018
  • In practice, the plebeians (the general citizenry) had fewer voting rights than the aristocratic patricians.
    — National Geographic, 4 Nov. 2019
  • Shakespeare’s haughty Roman war hero, revered on the battlefield yet reviled by hungry plebeians, becomes the flash point in a young democracy tearing itself apart over power and sacrifice.
    — Theater Critic, Los Angeles Times, 1 July 2026
  • Ofcourse the very distinguished Duke of Wellington will miraculously bring a little dignity by putting an end to to this unfortunate plebeian and his empire.
    — Zenger News, Forbes, 28 Nov. 2023
  • Celebrities surprising unsuspecting plebeians is practically a cottage industry at this point.
    — New York Times, 11 May 2018
  • Then there are normal dishes for plebeians not concerned with social-media fame, like chicken wings with spicy pineapple sauce, fiery papaya salad with long beans and an excellent green curry with eggplant as shiny-purple as an exotic beetle.
    — Kate Bradshaw, The Mercury News, 10 June 2024
  • But unlike us plebeians, the model got to come back as an adult and put her own stamp on the iconic toy store, which is reopening at 30 Rockefeller Center on November 16.
    — Chloe Foussianes, Town & Country, 25 Oct. 2018
  • Rome had experienced plenty of internal conflict between patricians and plebeians since its founding, but none rose to the level of war until 88 BCE.
    — Scott Spillman, New Republic, 30 Aug. 2017
  • In the latter years of the Roman Republic, landowners amassed unprecedented riches while plebeians floundered, spawning resentment that infected many corners of society.
    — Anand Gopal, New Yorker, 28 Feb. 2026
  • May 31 is International Flight Attendant Day, but like us plebeians, most flight attendants circle Black Friday on their calendars first.
    — Katie Jackson, Travel + Leisure, 26 Nov. 2025

plebeian

2 of 2 adjective
  • That's right — getting a hole in one for Simpson is like yawning for plebeian humans.
    — Katherine Fitzgerald, azcentral, 1 Feb. 2020
  • The boy who said that the emperor had no clothes was not an élitist insulting the plebeian parade spectators.
    — Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 17 Feb. 2017
  • Linen and cotton, cooling garments, were too plebeian; the people posed nobly for street-style social-media accounts in leather jackets and low-slung jorts.
    — Doreen St. Félix, New Yorker, 27 June 2026
  • Then again, maybe my low penmanship expectations are the product of my plebeian public-school education.
    — Anne Thériault, Longreads, 25 May 2018
  • Its newest products are savings accounts and consumer loans, plebeian products that Goldman would never have deigned to offer before the crisis.
    — Nathaniel Popper, New York Times, 2 Aug. 2016
  • Behind the film lie the Panama Papers—the millions of files, leaked in 2016, that demonstrated how the wealthy stash their moola offshore and thereby avoid the plebeian vulgarity of tax.
    — Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, 20 Sep. 2019

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'plebeian.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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