middle

1. 1.

   being neither at the beginning nor at the end in a series

   “adolescence is an awkward in-between age”

   “in a mediate position”

   “the middle point on a line”

   Synonymsin-betweenmediate

   Similarintermediate
2. 2.

   equally distant from the extremes

   Synonymscenterhalfwaymidway

   Similarcentral
3. 3.

   of a stage in the development of a language or literature between earlier and later stages

   “Middle English is the English language from about 1100 to 1500”

   “Middle Gaelic”

   Antonymslateearly

   linguistics

4. 4.

   between an earlier and a later period of time

   “in the middle years”

   “in his middle thirties”

   Antonymslateearly

   Similarinterveningmid

1. 1.

   put in the middle

   Broaderput

Other forms of middle

plural

middles·

past tense

middled·

present participle

middling·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about middle

What does middle mean?

middle means "an area that is approximately central within some larger region". That is the primary sense; the word has 9 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in middle?

middle has 2 syllables: mid-dle. The stress falls on "mid". In IPA it is /ˈmɪdəl/.

What is another word for middle?

Close synonyms include center, centre, heart, eye, midriff. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

What is the opposite of middle?

The recorded antonyms are end, beginning, end, beginning.

Is middle a common word?

middle is banded "Core" — among the few thousand words that carry most english. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.