So-so

//ˈsəʊˌsəʊ// adj, adv, slang

adj, adv, slang ·Moderate ·High school level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    Neither good nor bad; tolerable, passable, indifferent. informal, not-comparable

    "The dessert was pretty good, but the meal was so-so."

Adjective
  1. 1
    being neither good nor bad wordnet
Adverb
  1. 1
    Neither very well nor very poorly. informal, not-comparable

    "He performed so-so during the tryouts, and the coach was undecided whether to add him to the team or not."

Adverb
  1. 1
    in an acceptable (but not outstanding) manner wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
acceptablyalrightaveragebetwixt and betweenblandlybleeding

Example

More examples

"My mother from Malaysia thinks that those three horses are so-so."

Etymology

From Middle English so so, from Old English swā swā, equivalent to so + so. Compare Dutch zozo (“so-so”), German soso (“so-so”), Norwegian så som så (“so-so”).

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.