middlebrow

adj

Etymology

From middle + brow, by analogy with highbrow and lowbrow. The term first appeared in Punch (1925) and was later used by Virginia Woolf (1930s) in an unsent letter to the New Statesman, published as a chapter in the book The Death of a Moth and Other Essays (1942).

  1. inherited from *h₃bʰrúHs — “brow
  2. inherited from *brūwō
  3. inherited from *brāwu
  4. inherited from brū
  5. inherited from browe
  6. compounded as middlebrow — “middle + brow

Definitions

  1. Neither highbrow or lowbrow, but somewhere in between.

  2. A person or thing that is neither highbrow nor lowbrow, but in between.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for middlebrow. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA