blue-blooded
adjEtymology From blue blood + -ed.
1
Aristocratic; noble; patrician.
- Fario was a withered little man, as ugly as though he were a blue-blooded grandee.1887, Katherine Prescott Wormeley, transl., The Two Brothers, translation of La Rabouilleuse by Honoré de Balzac:
- But, as I was saying, we listened and heard The Dowd drawl worse than ever. She drops her final g’s like a barmaid or a blue-blooded Aide-de-Camp.[1889 January], Rudyard Kipling, “A Second-rate Woman”, in Under the Deodars (A. H. Wheeler & Co.’s Indian Railway Library; no. 4), Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh: A[rthur] H[enry] Wheeler & Co.; London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, […], →OCLC, page 73:
2 more examples
- The Major was the very type of a blue-blooded old aristocrat; he was all noblesse oblige to those within the magic circle of his intimacy—but alas for those outside it!1908, Upton Sinclair, chapter XII, in The Metropolis:
- When I was thirty-five / It was a very good year / It was a very good year for blue-blooded girls / Of independent means / We'd ride in limousines1965, Ervin Drake, “It Was a Very Good Year”, performed by Frank Sinatra:
2
Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see blue, blooded.
- The garden snail, a blue-blooded land animal, is sometimes seen as food, sometimes as pest.
- Derived terms
- blue-bloodedness
- Related terms
- blue blood, red-blooded