middlenessn.

1841 C. W. Wall Exam. Anc. Orthogr. Jews: Pt. 2 ii. xii. 325 The ‘middleness that always aims at the middle’..is the definition of virtue in the abstract, given by one of those philosophers.

1859 Titan 28 627/1 It was the smaller people, the middle classes, that glory in their middleness, the independent women, the priests of God, who should have let the world alone.

1919 J. B. Cabell Jurgen 3 She is the factor of middleness, of mediocrity, of an avoidance of extremes.

1929 D. H. Lawrence Pansies 120 Their middleness is only an unreality separating two realities.

1941 E. F. Goldman Historiography & Urbanization 212 The middleness of the Middle States.

1963 Times 25 May 9/5 Some few fortunates have special attributes in highest degree, the majority have varying degrees of middleness, and the tail is sadly lacking in endowments.

1977 G. B. Dooley & T. Gill in D. M. Rumbaugh Language Learning by Chimpanzee xiii. 249 [They] found that an adolescent female chimpanzee could discriminate numerical ‘middleness’ with 75% accuracy with as many as 17 objects.

1996 Afr. Amer. Rev. 30 625 But Johnson's novel is less about movement and ‘passages’ than about ‘middle-ness’.