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Definition 2024


salaryman

salaryman

English

Noun

salaryman (plural salarymen)

  1. An employee, a worker; now especially a Japanese white-collar worker who works long hours and has an insignificant position within the corporate hierarchy. [from 18th c.]
    • 2000, Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, p. 205:
      In this way, the salaryman was both a progressive social stratum and an intellectual class.
    • 2011, ‘Land of the wasted talent’, The Economist, 5 Nov 2011:
      The Japanese workplace is not quite as sexist as it used to be. Pictures of naked women, ubiquitous on salarymen’s desks in the 1990s, have been removed.