midst
See also: 'midst
EnglishEdit
Alternative formsEdit
EtymologyEdit
From Middle English middes, midst, myddest (“middle”), from Old English midde, reshaped in Middle English phrases like in middes (“in the middle”) by analogy with adverbs in -(e)s; also compare Old English on middan, tōmiddes. Forms in -(e)st are probably due to influence of superlatives.[1]
PronunciationEdit
NounEdit
midst (plural midsts)
- (often literary) A place in the middle of something; may be used of a literal or metaphorical location.
- 1905, Baroness Emmuska Orczy, chapter 2, in The Affair at the Novelty Theatre[1]:
- Miss Phyllis Morgan, as the hapless heroine dressed in the shabbiest of clothes, appears in the midst of a gay and giddy throng; she apostrophises all and sundry there, including the villain, and has a magnificent scene which always brings down the house, and nightly adds to her histrionic laurels.
- 1995, Pitts, Mary Ellen, Toward a Dialogue of Understandings: Loren Eiseley and the Critique of Science, page 225:
- At dawn, in the midst of a mist that is both literal and the unformed shifting of thought, he encounters a young fox pup playfully shaking a bone.
- 2002, Schlueter, Nathan W., quoting Martin Luther King, Jr., I Have a Dream, 1963, speech, quoted in One Dream Or Two?: Justice in America and in the Thought of Martin Luther King, Jr., page 89:
- As he said in "I Have a Dream," the Negro "lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity."
SynonymsEdit
TranslationsEdit
place in the middle of something
PrepositionEdit
midst
- (rare) Among, in the middle of; amid.
- 1594, William Shakespeare, Lucrece (First Quarto), London: […] Richard Field, for Iohn Harrison, […], OCLC 236076664:
- She puts the period often from his place ; And 'midst the sentence so her accent breaks
QuotationsEdit
- For quotations using this term, see Citations:midst.
SynonymsEdit
Derived termsEdit
TranslationsEdit
in the middle of
ReferencesEdit
- ^ “middes, n.”, in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007.