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Article: Class
- Article from:
- Dictionary of American History
- Author:
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CLASS
CLASS.
"Class is obviously a difficult word," Raymond Williams wrote in
Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society
(1976). Class was a difficult word for Williams "both in its range of meanings and its complexity in that particular meaning where it describes social division." As a word in English, class probably first appeared in a Latin form,
classis,
during the sixteenth century.
Classis
was a Roman term for the differences of property among citizens. One mid-seventeenth-century scholar, Williams reports, glossed the term as "an order or distribution of people according to their several Degrees" but restricted the meaning by adding "in Schools (wherein the term is most ...