What does 'habitus' mean?

According to Bourdieu an individual’s 'habitus' can be understood as a lasting set of durable and transposable dispositions, through which the collective is inscribed upon the body of the individual. These acquired dispositions are simply our tastes and ways of being, embodied through socialisation from a young age. They are durable in the sense that they can never be changed entirely, and transposable from one social field to another. 

The notion of habitus is commonly used to understand social classes and how they are reproduced over time. For example, if I was born into a working class family and socialised in that environment, the way I speak, act and my hobbies would all be informed by the working class habitus. In this sense, I have embodied the collective 'working class'. Although a working class habitus thrives in that social field, outside of that social field the working class habitus is distinctly devalued. Although Bourdieu doesn’t expand on why this might be, others have using his theory of the habitus as a means for understanding how class societies are reproduced.