burgher
/ˈbɜː(ɹ)ɡə(ɹ)/ noun
Forms burghers burger
- noun A citizen of a borough or town, especially one belonging to the middle class.
- noun A member of the medieval mercantile class.
- noun A citizen of a medieval city.
- noun A prosperous member of the community; a middle-class citizen (may connote complacency).
- noun A member of a mixed-race ethnic group of Sri Lanka, consisting of descendants of European colonists and local people.
Synonyms
Etymology
From Middle English burger, burgher, burghere, equivalent to burgh + -er (“inhabitant of”). Likely merged with and reinforced by Middle Dutch burgher (Modern Dutch: burger); from Middle High German burger (Modern German: Bürger); from Old High German burgāri (“inhabitant of a fortress”); derivative of burg (“fortress, citadel”), from Proto-West Germanic *burg, from Proto-Germanic *burgz, from Proto-Indo-European *bʰerǵʰ- (“fortified elevation”).
Compare also Old English burgwaras (“inhabitants of a burg, burghers, citizens”) and Serbo-Croatian purger. More at borough.
From burgher (“middle-class person”) and the synonymous Dutch burger. The European colonists who mixed with natives were of that social stratum.
Webster’s 1913
- noun A freeman of a burgh or borough, entitled to enjoy the privileges of the place; any inhabitant of a borough.
- noun A member of that party, among the Scotch seceders, which asserted the lawfulness of the burgess oath (in which burgesses profess "the true religion professed within the realm"), the opposite party being called antiburghers.
Etymology [From burgh; akin to D. burger, G. bürger, Dan. borger, Sw. borgare. See Burgh.]
Sources: Wiktionary · WordNet 3.0 · Webster’s 1913 — from the Wiktionary entry “burgher”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details