Middlebrow
adj, noun ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A person or thing that is neither highbrow nor lowbrow, but in between.
- 2 someone who is neither a highbrow nor a lowbrow wordnet
- 1 Neither highbrow or lowbrow, but somewhere in between. derogatory, not-comparable
"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 culture?"
Example
More examples"Calling this, or really any, TV show middlebrow is judgmental in nature."
Etymology
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).
More for "middlebrow"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.