middle groundn.

1653 Descr. & Plat Sea-coasts Eng. 12 Within them lyeth a plate on the starboard side, a little to the n. wards of the Haven, called the Middle-ground.

1668 T. Allin Jrnl. 24 Jan. (1940) (modernized text) II. 4 Having the buoy of the Middle Ground to the northward of us 4 cables' length.

1773 in E. W. McMullen Eng. Topogr. Terms in Florida (1953) 151 The Bar of the Inlet has two Channels separated by a small middle Ground in the Bar.

1801 Ld. Nelson in A. Duncan Life (1806) 146 The Channel of the Outer Deep, and the position of the Middle Ground.

1874 F. G. D. Bedford Sailor's Pocket Bk. v. 108 Where a middle ground exists in a channel, each end of it will be marked by a buoy of the colour in use in that channel.

1896 Overland Monthly Oct. 383/2 Their burdens of detritus find fitful equipoise on the spit terminals, on the middle ground within, or on the bar without the entrance.

1753 W. Hogarth Anal. Beauty xiii. 112 Painters..divide theirs [sc. compositions] into fore-ground, middle-ground, and distance or back-ground.

1791 W. Gilpin Remarks Forest Scenery II. 62 There is a fore-ground, a middle-ground and distance—all harmoniously united.

1890 Dict. National Biogr. XXII. 3/1 The distinct unbroken patches of yellow, orange, green, red, brown, &c., which..made up the foreground, middle-grounds, and off-skip in his compositions.

1971 Daily Tel. 21 May (Colour Suppl.) 31 Vineyards fill the foreground; in the middleground a massive stone wall encloses the village itself.

1996 S. Heaney Spirit Level 48 The bedding-straw Piled to one side, like a nativity Foreground and background waiting for the figures. And then, in the middle ground, the swing itself.

1829 I. Taylor Nat. Hist. Enthusiasm ii. 46 When..the central facts of Christianity are obscured, no middle ground remains between the apathy of formality and the extravagance of enthusiasm.

1884 Times (Weekly ed.) 5 Sept. 5/5 These societies take a middle ground between agnosticism and theism.

1913 C. Booth Industr. Unrest 16 The Guild Socialists in England occupy middle ground between Syndicalist and Socialist.

1939 Fortune Oct. 137/2 As it would be with the Republicans if they were in power, the Democratic middle ground is a political catchall.

1961 A. Smith East-Enders vi. 102 The middleground is missing... There's no common place inside the East End for everyone as there used to be.

1972 Language 48 278 In the case of terms like possible and impossible, there is no middle ground; but that is simply the nature of terms which permit no qualification.

1994 Daily Tel. 17 Aug. 21/2 With Labour's Tony Blair seeking to steal the political middleground by talking of lower taxes..the Tories will be under pressure to match the promises.

1954 E. M. Borgese tr. H. Schenker Harmony p. xxii ‘Tonicalization’, however, affects only the subordinate strata—the middle ground, in Schenker's terminology—or the surface phenomena of a composition—its foreground.

1970 W. Apel Harvard Dict. Music (rev. ed.) 754/2 Schenker's approach to musical analysis is a process of stepwise reduction, leading from the actual composition (foreground) over an intermediate stage (middle ground) to the Ursatz (background). The middle ground is a simplified version of the foreground, including the essential elements or the raw materials of the composition.

1993 Computers & Humanities 27 283/1 Surface events of the foreground (effectively, the heard or played music) were shown to be elaborations of simpler structures at middleground level.