Word.ws English Dictionary

middlebrow

middlebrow adjective: neither highbrow or lowbrow, but somewhere in between.

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
    • As in so many middlebrow period dramas, the vintage cars are too shiny, the clothes too smart, the upper-class accents too strained and the dialogue too contrived. However dark the plot becomes, the sun keeps shining brightly through the trees.2017 September 29, “Winnie-the-Pooh brought joy to readers, but misery to the Milnes”, in The Economist, archived from the original on 08 Aug 2020

Noun

middlebrow (plural middlebrows)

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

Forms of middlebrow

Adjective
alternative formmiddle-brow
alternative formmiddle brow
Noun
pluralmiddlebrows

Origin of middlebrow

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).

Words formed from middlebrow

Questions about middlebrow

What does middlebrow mean?
Middlebrow means neither highbrow or lowbrow, but somewhere in between.
What part of speech is middlebrow?
Middlebrow can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near middlebrow in the dictionary

  1. middlebrains
  2. middlebreaker
  3. middlebreakers
  4. Middlebrook
  5. Middlebrooks
  6. middlebrow
  7. middlebrowed
  8. middlebrowism
  9. middlebrows
  10. Middleburg
  11. middleburster

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: 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: “middlebrow.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/middlebrow. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.