Genteel means “of or relating to people who have high social status” and can be used as a somewhat old-fashioned synonym of aristocratic. It can also be used to describe something with a quietly appealing or polite quality, as in “genteel manners.”

// Their genteel upbringing shaped the way they viewed the world.

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“The duo met at Oxford and were briefly bankers. They understand the genteel, often mysterious (at least to Americans) mores of the British upper class ...” — Jacqueline Cutler, The Daily Beast, 28 Jan. 2026

In A History of the Novel (1975), David Freedman wrote of Theodore Dreiser, “Certainly there was nothing genteel about Dreiser, either as a man or novelist.” Indeed, few of the many uses of the adjective genteel would seem to apply to the author. When it comes to the use of genteel to describe people or things of or related to the upper class of society, for example, Dreiser doesn’t fit the bill: unlike many of his contemporaries, including Edith Wharton, Dreiser came from poverty. His novels, too, are hardly genteel in the sense of “striving to maintain the appearance of superior or middle-class social status or respectability.” Sister Carrie, his best known work, features a heroine who goes unpunished for her transgressions against conventional sexual morality. In fact, the book so troubled the genteel (“polite”) sensibilities of Dreiser’s publishers that they limited the book’s advertising, and it initially sold fewer than 500 copies. Sister Carrie is now considered a masterpiece, and Dreiser, according to Freedman, “the supreme poet of the squalid” who “felt the terror, the pity, and the beauty underlying the American Dream.”