Main Street

The street name sense is by proprialization from main street. The everyday-people sense is by metonymy.

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Main Street

1. The proper name of the main street of any of many villages, towns, or small cities, especially in the United States, Canada, Ireland, and some parts of Scotland.

   Near-synonym: High Street (esp. UK)

2. (idiomatic, Canada, US, collective) Everyday working-class people and small business owners, especially with regard to their concerns, social views, etc.

   Synonyms: common man, everyman

   Coordinate terms: Wall Street, Bay Street, Sand Hill Road

   Near-synonyms: High Street (UK); precariat, proletariat, working class, middle class

   • 2011 January–February, Chrystia Freeland, “The rise of the new global elite”, in The Atlantic‎^[1], archived from the original on 20 December 2015:

     Thanks to a $700 billion TARP bailout and hundreds of billions of dollars in nearly free of charge loans by the Federal Reserve (a policy Soros himself told me was a "hidden gift" to the banks), Wall Street has surged back to pre-crisis levels of compensation even as Main Street continues to struggle.

• For more quotations using this term, see Citations:Main Street.

• antimeters, intermates, martensite, misentreat, terminates, tetramines