Word.ws English Dictionary

midlist

midlist adjective: unlikely to be more than modestly successful.

Adjective

midlist (not comparable)

  1. Unlikely to be more than modestly successful.
    • He scoffs at the lesser-known, midlist and emerging authors […].2007 June 4, Celia Mcgee, “A Way to Give Authors a Lucrative Second Platform”, in New York Times
  2. (attributive) Expected to achieve sales performance that blends frontlist performance with backlist performance, being neither a bestseller when new nor a perennial backlist performer but strong enough in each of those categories to be successful overall.
    • The celebrity tell-all has been proposed as a frontlist title, whereas the cookbook has been proposed as a backlist title and the food history book as a midlist title.

Origin of midlist

From mid- + list.

Questions about midlist

What does midlist mean?
Midlist means unlikely to be more than modestly successful.
What part of speech is midlist?
Midlist is an adjective.

Words near midlist in the dictionary

  1. midliners
  2. midlines
  3. midling
  4. midlings
  5. midlingual
  6. midlist
  7. midlittoral
  8. midlives
  9. midlobe
  10. midlobes
  11. midlogarithmic

Source and license

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