middling

[ mid-ling ]

adjective

1. medium, moderate, or average in size, quantity, or quality:

   The returns on such a large investment may be only middling.

2. mediocre; ordinary; commonplace; pedestrian:

   The restaurant's entrées are no better than middling.

3. Older Use. in fairly good health.

adverb

1. moderately; fairly.

noun

1. middlings, any of various products or commodities of intermediate quality, grade, size, etc., as the coarser particles of ground wheat mingled with bran.
2. Often middlings. Also called middling meat. Chiefly Midland and Southern U.S. salt pork or smoked side meat.

middling

/ ˈmɪdlɪŋ /

adjective

1. mediocre in quality, size, etc; neither good nor bad, esp in health (often in the phrase fair to middling )

adverb

1. informal.
   moderately

   middling well

Derived Forms

• ˈmiddlingly, adverb

Other Words From

• middling·ly adverb

Word History and Origins

Origin of middling¹

First recorded in 1375–1425; late Middle English (north) medlinge (present participle) “coming between, middle”; mid ¹, -ling ²

Word History and Origins

Origin of middling¹

C15 (northern English and Scottish): from mid ¹+ -ling ²

Idioms and Phrases

see fair to middling .

Example Sentences

You could have schools with very middling results that are serving very disadvantaged kids and really contributing quite a lot to their education.

From Voice of San Diego

I could ride a shortboard, get the occasional good wave, and stay out of the way of better surfers, but I had always been middling at best.

From Outside Online

The Clippers had little fan support, and they oscillated between being league bottom-dwellers and a middling franchise.

From ProPublica

When a once-celebrated author winds up teaching in a middling MFA program, he’s sure he’s squandered his chance at lasting success — until one of his promising pupils dies, inspiring the novelist to claim the student’s book idea as his own.

From Washington Post

Murphy had middling approval ratings before the pandemic, with one in five voters holding no opinion of how he was doing.

From Washington Post

He was living under the alias Alonso Rivera Muñoz as a middling real estate developer and art collector in Querétaro.

From The Daily Beast

After a few middling seasons from the revered hometown team, a few of the neighbors raised their eyebrows in surprise at the news.

From The Daily Beast

What if he had tried to come back, only to play a couple middling seasons and then grudgingly retire or, worse, become a backup?

From The Daily Beast

Unlike hoity-toity displays of pedigree fluff, the Average Joe Cat Show is a celebration of middling felines.

From The Daily Beast

This is a middling jobs report for the middle of the business cycle.

From The Daily Beast

I presume there will be more middling and half middling yields within twenty miles of Paris than in all Belgium.

From Project Gutenberg

Nothing keeps longer than a middling fortune, and nothing melts away sooner than a large one.

From Project Gutenberg

She worked me middling hard for about an hour, and then the widow made her ease up.

From Project Gutenberg

The head is conical, and of a middling size, with respect to the bulk of the body.

From Project Gutenberg

Little did he think that that middling oat-bearing land was being minded and brooded upon.

From Project Gutenberg

Related Words

• mediocre
• passable
• run-of-the-mill
• so-so