Word.ws English Dictionary

middle-brow

middle-brow is the alternative form of middlebrow.

Meaning of middlebrow

Adjective

middlebrow (not comparable)

  1. (derogatory) Neither highbrow or lowbrow, but somewhere in between.
    • What does a Princeton graduate whose old dream it was to write for the New Yorker do when that dream comes true, only to discover that his cherished magazine is no longer the middlebrow arbiter of high culture of his imagining, but just another media outlet frantic for its market share of mass...2000 September 21, Hal Foster, “Slumming with Rappers at the Roxy”, in London Review of Books, volume 22, number 18, →ISSN, archived from the original on 20 Mar 2025

See all 2 meanings of middlebrow

Forms of middle-brow

Adjective
comparativemore middle-brow
superlativemost middle-brow
Noun
pluralmiddle-brows

Questions about middle-brow

What is middle-brow the alternative form of?
Middle-brow is the alternative form of middlebrow.

Words near middle-brow in the dictionary

  1. middle-aisled it
  2. middle-aisles it
  3. middle-aisling it
  4. middle-brain
  5. middle-brains
  6. middle-brow
  7. middle-browism
  8. middle-brows
  9. middle-child syndrome
  10. middle-class
  11. middle-classness

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: middle-brow (page history and authors); middlebrow (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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Cite this entry: “middle-brow.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/middle-brow. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.