Middlebrow

Quick meaning: Middlebrow is an adjective meaning (derogatory) Neither highbrow or lowbrow, but somewhere in between.

Meaning

(derogatory) Neither highbrow or lowbrow, but somewhere in between.

More Meanings

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

Example Sentences

It's for this reason some regard Hanks with a sniffy attitude, seeing his middlebrow Hollywood fare as unfashionable (yes) and reactionary (no).

As in so many middlebrow period dramas, the vintage cars are too shiny, the clothes too smart, the upper-class accents too strained and the dialogue too contrived. However dark the plot becomes, the sun keeps shining brightly through the trees.

What does a Princeton graduate whose old dream it was to write for the New Yorker do when that dream comes true, only to discover that his cherished magazine is no longer the middlebrow arbiter of high culture of his imagining, but just another media outlet frantic for its market share of mass culture?

In the late ’60s and early ’70s, as independent films were diversifying their outlook and shaking off the formulas of Hollywood storytelling, Broadway boulevard comedies like “Last of the Red Hot Lovers” and “California Suite” — tales of the befuddled nouveau riche in a new world — began to look mass-produced and middlebrow.

Word Forms

• middle-brow
• middle brow
• middlebrows

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include midbrow, medium-brow, middlebrowed, no-brow, midclass, midbroad.

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