Middletown

¹

[ mid-l-toun ]

noun

, (sometimes lowercase)

1. a typical American town or small city with traditional values and mores.

Middletown

²

[ mid-l-toun ]

noun

1. a township in E New Jersey.
2. a city in SW Ohio, on the Miami River.
3. a city in central Connecticut, on the Connecticut River.
4. a city in SE New York.
5. a town in SE Rhode Island.
6. a town in E Pennsylvania.

Other Words From

• Middle·towner noun

Word History and Origins

Origin of Middletown¹

After a pseudonymously named town studied in a book with the same title (1929) by U.S. sociologists Robert S. Lynd (1892–1970) and Helen Merrell Lynd (1896–1982); the town actually studied was Muncie, Ind.

Example Sentences

She also takes issue with the fact that JD Vance never actually lived in Appalachia — he grew up in Middletown, Ohio, and spent summers with family in Kentucky — and was not born a Vance like her, but changed his name to his maternal grandmother’s last name.

From Los Angeles Times

Middletown is located in rust-belt Ohio, but Vance identified closely with his extended family’s roots to the south in Appalachia, the vast mountainous inland region that stretches from the Deep South to the fringes of the industrial Midwest and north-east.

From BBC

By the time the book came out, Vance’s own bootstrap-tugging had slung him far away from Middletown: first to the US Marines and a tour of duty in Iraq, and later to Ohio State University, Yale Law School and a job as a venture capitalist in California.

From BBC

Vance rose to national prominence with his best-selling book, Hillbilly Elegy, the story of his family’s origins in eastern Kentucky, their struggle with poverty, his mother’s fight with addiction and the joblessness and blight of Middletown, Ohio, where he grew up.

From BBC

His family never had to worry about money; his grandfather, grandmother and mother all had houses in a suburban neighborhood in Middletown, Ohio.

From Salon