What is "middling"

Usage examples of "middling".

She seemed to like me middling tolerable, but I had rivals, notably a snub-nosed Arizona waddy by the name of Bizz Ridgeway.

I was but merely saying that when we reach the lodge wherein I am making my headquarters in this principality, you will be provided all your immediate needsservants to bathe you, the services of my barber, who also happens to be a fair to middling leech, cupper, and drawer of teeth, clothing and accouterments commensurate with your true rank and station, and, do you give me your parole, weapons.

All in all, the deniers that day and that weekend seemed the most middling of Middle Americans.

As far as the candlelight and his unwashed, unkempt condition make it possible to judge, he is a man of middling stature and undistinguished appearance, with strong neck and shoulders, a roundish, obstinate looking head covered with short crisp bronze curls, clear quick blue eyes and good brows and mouth, a hopelessly prosaic nose like that of a strong-minded baby, trim soldierlike carriage and energetic manner, and with all his wits about him in spite of his desperate predicament--even with a sense of humor of it, without, however, the least intention of trifling with it or throwing away a chance.

I knew him to be fair-minded and well respected, a middling man who had inherited a modest title from a cousin and a large brewery from his father and had done his best by both.

They ricketed over the middling townscape of Ludmead with late-shift workers.

Both were only middling tall, but wide in the shoulders, with chests so massive as to look unhealthful, like goiters.

If we flee instead, then it is not only the Alemanni massing along the Rhine who will pour into Gaul, but every middling tribe from the Alps to the northern sea and from the Rhine to the Black Forest will pour out their hidden valleys and caves and rush like floodwaters into our cities.

During the war years, while my father, a Zionist and anti-Fascist volunteer, was in the army, I was brought up by my maternal grandparents in a middling suburb of north-west London, part of the classical migratory route for Ashkenazi Jews who had come over from Russia and Poland and settled in east London in the early part of the century.

I am a sort of a cross between a ghostwriter and research assistant, have published two middling bad detective pulps, written some poetry nobody likes but me, and put out a few amateur publications, about which nobody has gone into ecstasy.

In the Cutler theory, the Jerome Quats of the academic world were born to parents in the middling strata of American society who told them from as far back as they could remember that life was a Manichaean battlei.

These embrace the whales of middling magnitude, among which at present may be numbered:--I.

Walking among the mortals, playing the role of middling sorceresssuch a deadly risk, though perhaps this is what entices you so to the mortal game.

As the pot-emptier straightened, El saw that the man was of middling years and possessed of raven-dark hair, good looks framed by razor-edged sideburns, one normal.

Cerise leaned back in her seat as the hordes of pedestrians flowed around the car like water around the rocks in a streambed, not wanting to pay attention to them, men and women in cheap-corporate suits, the middling sort who kept the companies running and the money flowing.