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middling
[ mid-ling ]
adjective
- medium, moderate, or average in size, quantity, or quality:
The returns on such a large investment may be only middling.
The restaurant's entrées are no better than middling.
- Older Use. in fairly good health.
adverb
- moderately; fairly.
noun
- middlings, any of various products or commodities of intermediate quality, grade, size, etc., as the coarser particles of ground wheat mingled with bran.
- Often middlings. Also called middling meat. Chiefly Midland and Southern U.S. salt pork or smoked side meat.
middling
/ ˈmɪdlɪŋ /
adjective
- mediocre in quality, size, etc; neither good nor bad, esp in health (often in the phrase fair to middling )
adverb
- informal.moderately
middling well
Derived Forms
- ˈmiddlingly, adverb
Other Words From
- middling·ly adverb
Word History and Origins
Word History and Origins
Origin of middling1
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.
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.
The Clippers had little fan support, and they oscillated between being league bottom-dwellers and a middling franchise.
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.
Murphy had middling approval ratings before the pandemic, with one in five voters holding no opinion of how he was doing.
He was living under the alias Alonso Rivera Muñoz as a middling real estate developer and art collector in Querétaro.
After a few middling seasons from the revered hometown team, a few of the neighbors raised their eyebrows in surprise at the news.
What if he had tried to come back, only to play a couple middling seasons and then grudgingly retire or, worse, become a backup?
Unlike hoity-toity displays of pedigree fluff, the Average Joe Cat Show is a celebration of middling felines.
This is a middling jobs report for the middle of the business cycle.
I presume there will be more middling and half middling yields within twenty miles of Paris than in all Belgium.
Nothing keeps longer than a middling fortune, and nothing melts away sooner than a large one.
She worked me middling hard for about an hour, and then the widow made her ease up.
The head is conical, and of a middling size, with respect to the bulk of the body.
Little did he think that that middling oat-bearing land was being minded and brooded upon.
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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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