Word.ws English Dictionary

midness

midness noun: the state or quality of being mid.

Noun

midness (uncountable)

  1. (rare) The state or quality of being mid.
    • Rule (11) formulates that short, non-high vowels that agree in backness, roundness and midness (/a/: [- mid, - back, - round]; 10/: [+ mid, + back, + round]) are lengthened before voiceless fricatives.2021 [1985], Beat Glauser, “7: Linguistic Atlases and Generative Phonology”, in Routledge Library Editions: Linguistics, volume 26, Taylor & Francis, page 118
    • After Bauer (1926/70:11) and Cantineau (1960:111), I analyse this mid height as the result of lowering conditioned by postvelars. It is phonetic because the high vowels are gradiently mid, their degree of midness depending on their degree of proximity to the postvelar. This is illustrated by...2003, Kimary N. Shahin, Postvelar Harmony, John Benjamins Publishing Company, →ISBN, page 69

Examples of midness in a sentence

  • It is phonetic because the high vowels are gradiently mid, their degree of midness depending on their degree of proximity to the postvelar.2003, Kimary N. Shahin, Postvelar Harmony, John Benjamins Publishing Company, →ISBN, page 69:
  • The curly brackets are necessary because notions such as non-lowness, midness, etc. are not accessible, as such but only implicit in the naming.2014, Jacques Durand, Generative and Non-Linear Phonology, Taylor & Francis, →ISBN, page 81:

Origin of midness

Synchronically, by surface analysis, mid + -ness; diachronically, known to have an equivalent etymon in Old English and probably never absent from the language since then, albeit rare.

Questions about midness

What does midness mean?
Midness means the state or quality of being mid.
How do you use midness in a sentence?
It is phonetic because the high vowels are gradiently mid, their degree of midness depending on their degree of proximity to the postvelar.
What part of speech is midness?
Midness is a noun.

Words near midness in the dictionary

  1. Midnapore
  2. midneck
  3. midnecks
  4. midnerve
  5. midnerves
  6. midness
  7. midneurogenesis
  8. midnight
  9. midnight appointment
  10. midnight appointments
  11. midnight blue

Source and license

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