well-bred
adj1
Of animals Of good breed.
2
Of people Well-mannered and refined because of a good upbringing and education (and, originally and literally but usually not in current usage, because well-born in a eugenic sense).
- Halpin [Frayser]’s death and the post-mortem demoniacalness of the well-bred Southern woman, lops off the grafted branches of the human and cuts it down to that stump of itself which is primordial, persistent, unconscious animalism.1918, The Stratford Monthly: An International Magazine, Boston, Mass.: Stratford Company, →OCLC, page 44:
- Ideally you should relax—though well-bred English people do no feel entirely at ease in a room full of naked strangers beating one another.1986, Marc Polonsky, Russell Taylor, USSR, From an Original Idea by Karl Marx, Faber and Faber, →ISBN: