mid-Atlanticn.adj.

1804 W. L. Bowles Spirit of Discov. iv. 161 Columbus' toiling ship is on the deep, Stemming the mid Atlantic.

1851 H. Melville Moby-Dick liii. 266 Whereas, some merchant ships crossing each other's wake in the mid-Atlantic, will oftentimes pass on without..a single word of recognition.

1880 19th Cent. Apr. 609 All the best hydrographers..agree..that the Florida current dies out in the mid-Atlantic.

1892 ‘M. Twain’ Amer. Claimant 65 Two shipments would meet and part in mid-Atlantic.

1916 A. MacLeish Lett. (1983) 25 I sit here in mid-Atlantic..and grieve somewhat that the old infidelities to lie are over.

1940 G. Greene 19 Stories (1947) 184 Central heating gave it the stuffy smell of mid-Atlantic.

1957 M. Swan Brit. Guiana i. 25 The ship in which he was returning to England from the United States was wrecked in mid-Atlantic.

1990 B. Bryson Mother Tongue vii. 116 The most far-flung variety of English is that found on Tristan da Cunha, a small group of islands in the mid-Atlantic roughly halfway between Africa and South America.

1975 A. Price Our Man in Camelot ii. 40 The voice was wrong too—anglicised mid-Atlantic, if not Ivy League.

1978 D. Mosley in R. Buckle U & Non-U Revisited 3 The Duke of Windsor spoke ‘mid-Atlantic’.

1998 Daily Tel. 10 Feb. 19/5 Ms Edwards..has an accent which occasionally switches from upper-class English to Mid-Atlantic.

1874 Appletons' Jrnl. 21 Feb. 239 A sight as different from their summer ideal as a mid-Atlantic mid-winter storm varies from a tranquil moonlight on the Ægean Sea.

1928 Jrnl. Ecol. 16 150 The winds are extremely strong and penetrating, reminding one of a mid-Atlantic gale.

1933 Biol. Bull. 65 317 (title) Observations on the penetration of daylight into mid-Atlantic and coastal waters.

1959 Chambers's Encycl. X. 153/1 The chief feature of the topography of the bottom of the Atlantic is the Mid-Atlantic ridge.

1966 R. W. Fairbridge Encycl. Oceanogr. 506 The Mid-Atlantic Ridge is that portion of the mid-oceanic ridge system which lies within the limits of the Atlantic Ocean.

1992 Ships Monthly Apr. 33/2 For a few more months the Widder cruised around the mid-Atlantic area and sank a few more ships.

1876 Virginia: Geogr. & Polit. Summary i. vi. 159 Hampton Roads..may justly be called The Harbor of the Mid-Atlantic coast of the United States.

1916 N.Y. Times 12 Feb. 7/4 There was a conference of the Mid-Atlantic States' members of the Congressional Union yesterday.

1955 Amer. Hist. Rev. 60 740 Powell found it impossible to prove that there is no Mid-Atlantic region on the ground that it has probably been as much a region as either of the other two oldest areas of British America.

1962 Amer. Speech 37 16 After 1900, the largest number of in-migrants came [to New York] from the Mid-Atlantic states.

1994 News Jrnl. (Wilmington, Delaware) 25 Aug. b6/1 Competition for black students is ‘ferocious’, Walker said, with UD vying with the Ivy League and other well-known Northeast and Mid-Atlantic institutions.

1958 Spectator 7 Feb. 164/1 I crossed swords with the redoubtable Douglas Fairbanks Jr. on whether or not his television films could justly be called ‘British’..; my argument was that as they aim at the American—or ‘mid-Atlantic’—market, they do not deserve the name.

1962 Radio Times 22 Nov. 41/2 A spell in Hollywood where he was sent by the studio to which he was under contract to acquire a ‘mid-Atlantic’ accent.

1970 Observer 8 Feb. 30/6 There's another sameness too, a mid-Atlantic look.

1978 P. Howard Weasel Words 11 The nightmare that..in a hundred years the whole world will..have the same mid-Atlantic pronunciation.

1997 Village Voice (N.Y.) 22 Apr. 41/3 One pleasure is hearing young, educated diaspora speak—mid-Atlantic speech peppered with art-house ebonics, Yoruba and Santeria references.