middling
medium, moderate, or average in size, quantity, or quality: The returns on such a large investment may be only middling.
mediocre; ordinary; commonplace; pedestrian: The restaurant's entrées are no better than middling.
Older Use. in fairly good health.
moderately; fairly.
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.
Origin of middling
1Other words from middling
- mid·dling·ly, adverb
Words Nearby middling
Dictionary.com Unabridged Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2024
How to use middling in a sentence
You could have schools with very middling results that are serving very disadvantaged kids and really contributing quite a lot to their education.
A New Window Into How San Diego Schools Are Performing | Will Huntsberry | July 28, 2021 | Voice of San DiegoI 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.
The Billionaire Playbook: How Sports Owners Use Their Teams to Avoid Millions in Taxes | by Robert Faturechi, Justin Elliott and Ellis Simani | July 8, 2021 | ProPublicaWhen 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.
20 books to read this summer | Washington Post Editors and Reviewers | May 27, 2021 | Washington PostMurphy 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?
The Injuries That Made Peyton Manning and Tom Brady | Ben Teitelbaum | January 19, 2014 | THE DAILY BEASTUnlike hoity-toity displays of pedigree fluff, the Average Joe Cat Show is a celebration of middling felines.
The Cat's Meow: Top 10 Destinations for Feline Fanatics | Lonely Planet | December 20, 2013 | THE DAILY BEASTThis is a middling jobs report for the middle of the business cycle.
The Slow, Grinding Repair of the American Labor Market | Megan McArdle | May 3, 2013 | THE DAILY BEASTI presume there will be more middling and half middling yields within twenty miles of Paris than in all Belgium.
Glances at Europe | Horace GreeleyNothing keeps longer than a middling fortune, and nothing melts away sooner than a large one.
The 'Characters' of Jean de La Bruyre | Jean de La BruyreShe worked me middling hard for about an hour, and then the widow made her ease up.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Complete | Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)The head is conical, and of a middling size, with respect to the bulk of the body.
Buffon's Natural History. Volume IX (of 10) | Georges Louis Leclerc de BuffonLittle did he think that that middling oat-bearing land was being minded and brooded upon.
Mushroom Town | Oliver Onions
British Dictionary definitions for middling
/ (ˈmɪdlɪŋ) /
mediocre in quality, size, etc; neither good nor bad, esp in health (often in the phrase fair to middling)
informal moderately: middling well
Origin of middling
1Derived forms of middling
- middlingly, adverb
Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012
Other Idioms and Phrases with middling
see fair to middling.
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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