well-bred

comparative better-bred · comparative more well-bred · superlative best-bred · superlative most well-bred · alternative wellbred

1. Of good breed.
2. 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).

   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

   1 more example

   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