What is the difference between gentry and nobility

County, however, carries a suggestion of an association of the family with the county or section and usually of ownership of an estate in the country. Elite is referable not to a social rank but to those members of any group or class who stand out as its flower or the ones most frequently sought after. When used without qualification elite usually means the group regarded as the highest, especially as judged by social or cultural standards.

Society is applied to that portion of a community which marks itself apart as a leisured class much given to formal entertainments, fashionable sports, and other pursuits characteristic of an active social life. The grounds of this are virtue and talents —Jefferson Usually the term connotes superiority in birth, breeding, and social station and is applicable to all those persons generally recognized as first in family and in personal importance.

This is the harmless, inoffensive, untitled aristocracy —Holmes However, in countries where there is a privileged and titled class, the nobility , aristocracy is often used to designate the same group with this difference in implication: that nobility stresses rank inferior to that of royalty but superior to that of all other classes, and aristocracy stresses the possession of power over the people through ownership of land and through long-established and generally acknowledged superiority.

Amend vs Emend. Any one vs Anyone. Kree in California, who learned something today -- the rank order of UK nobility. No, they aren't. Read Kree's answer in this thread.

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