middlebrow

Meanings

Adjective

• Neither highbrow or lowbrow, but somewhere in between.

Noun

• A person or thing that is neither highbrow nor lowbrow, but in between.

Origin

• 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).