Word.ws English Dictionary

fair to middling

fair to middling adjective: only tolerably good; somewhat favorable.

Adjective

fair to middling (not comparable)

  1. (idiomatic, usually hyphenated when placed before noun) Only tolerably good; somewhat favorable.
    • "O'er Waiting Harpstrings of the Mind" is pretty good, quite fair to middling—the whole seven of the stanzas—but repetition would be certain to take the excitement out of it in the course of time.1907, Mark Twain, chapter 7, in Christian Science
    • Not a heluva good one, but fair to middlin’.1911, Peter B. Kyne, chapter 29, in Captain Scraggs or The Green-Pea Pirates
    Synonyms:
    adequate, OK, tolerable

fair to middling meaning in Bengali

fair to middling in Bengali

কেবল সহনীয়ভাবে ভালো, সামান্য অনুকূল

Synonyms of fair to middling

Forms of fair to middling

alternative formfair-to-middling
alternative formfair to middlin'
alternative formfair to meddling

Origin of fair to middling

From the practice of classifying agricultural commodities as fair or middling. The earliest attested instance of these descriptions being combined into the phrase fair to middling was in a British publication of 1822 but the first instance of this usage being generalised is from an American publication of 1837

Questions about fair to middling

What does fair to middling mean?
Fair to middling means only tolerably good; somewhat favorable.
What is fair to middling in Bengali?
Fair to middling in Bengali is কেবল সহনীয়ভাবে ভালো, সামান্য অনুকূল. See Fair to middling meaning in Bengali.
What part of speech is fair to middling?
Fair to middling is an adjective.

Words near fair to middling in the dictionary

  1. fair suck of the sauce bottle
  2. fair suck of the sauce stick
  3. fair suck of the sav
  4. fair to meddling
  5. fair to middlin'
  6. fair to middling
  7. fair trade
  8. fair trades
  9. fair trial
  10. fair trials
  11. fair up

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fair to middling (page history and authors); fair to middling (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Naomi Persephone Amethyst (NaomiAmethyst)-fair to middling.wav.

Cite this entry: “fair to middling.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/fair_to_middling. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.