Yes, We’ll Tell You: This Is What “Mid” Means

In everyday language, you’ll hear people talk about things being in midair, or in the mid-Atlantic. We have midterms, and both midsummer and midwinter. Places might be midtown, or in the midlands, while things might happen midweek, mid-afternoon, at midnight, or midway through something else. And you might even know someone currently going through something of a midlife crisis. 

In contexts like these, the adjective mid simply implies being in the middle—and in fact, middle and mid are distant etymological cousins (along with a host of other words implying middleness, like midst, midriff and amid). More recently, though, you might have heard the word mid being used a little differently, especially in online slang. 

Explaining the Slang

Since around the early 2010s at least, mid has come to be used to imply not that something is in the middle of something else, but that it is of not particularly impressive quality or standing. In this version of the word, something that is described as mid is just okay—not great, but not necessarily bad either. It’s just… mid. 

This meaning of mid (which has recently exploded in popularly, thanks to its widespread use on TikTok in particular) often comes with the added implication that the thing being described is not just unexceptional, but something of a letdown too.

You might have expected that it was going to be great or impressive, but it’s ended up just being okay instead—or, in other words, mid. Notably, in this way the word is also often being used somewhat jokingly to express personal opinions about things that other people might rate more highly than you. So that film or that album that your friend thinks is the best of the year might just be mid at best in your eyes. 

In contexts like these, mid is essentially a synonym of words like mediocre, or middling—both of which are also among its distant etymological cousins, coincidentally. But despite the etymological connection here, this newer meaning of mid has apparently emerged out of a rather unexpected context. 

According to Merriam-Webster, the use of mid to mean mediocre emerged from early 2000s drug culture, when cannabis that was only of medium quality became widely known as mid-grade. By the late 2010s, this word had fallen into more general use outside of the language of narcotics to refer to anything at all—from food and music to movies and events—that was unimpressive or unremarkable, or somehow fell short of expectations. 

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