Word.ws English Dictionary

bread and roses

bread and roses noun: fair wages and dignified conditions.

Noun

bread and roses pl (plural only)

  1. (plural, plural-only) Fair wages and dignified conditions.

Origin of bread and roses

Originated in a speech given by American women's suffrage activist Helen Todd; a line in that speech about "bread for all, and roses too" inspired the poem Bread and Roses by James Oppenheim, which was published in 1911.

Questions about bread and roses

What does bread and roses mean?
Bread and roses means fair wages and dignified conditions.
What part of speech is bread and roses?
Bread and roses is a noun.

Words near bread and roses in the dictionary

  1. bread and cheese
  2. bread and circuses
  3. bread and games
  4. bread and honey
  5. bread and milk
  6. bread and roses
  7. bread and salt
  8. bread and scrape
  9. bread and water
  10. bread and wine
  11. bread bag

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bread and roses (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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