midst

• midest (obsolete)
• middis (obsolete)
• middst (obsolete)
• middest (obsolete)
• myddis (obsolete)
• mydst (obsolete)
• mydest (obsolete)
• myddst (obsolete)
• myddest (obsolete)

From Middle English in middes (“in the middle”).

• IPA^(key): /mɪdst/, [mɪdst], [mɪtst]

• Audio (US)

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɪdst

midst (plural midsts)

1. (often literary) A place in the middle of something; may be used of a literal or metaphorical location.
   • 1905, Baroness Emmuska Orczy, chapter 2, in The Affair at the Novelty Theatre‎:

     Miss Phyllis Morgan, as the hapless heroine dressed in the shabbiest of clothes, appears in the midst of a gay and giddy throng; she apostrophises all and sundry there, including the villain, and has a magnificent scene which always brings down the house, and nightly adds to her histrionic laurels.

   • 1995, Pitts, Mary Ellen, Toward a Dialogue of Understandings: Loren Eiseley and the Critique of Science, page 225:

     At dawn, in the midst of a mist that is both literal and the unformed shifting of thought, he encounters a young fox pup playfully shaking a bone.

   • 2002, Schlueter, Nathan W., quoting Martin Luther King, Jr., I Have a Dream, 1963, speech, quoted in 'One Dream Or Two?: Justice in America and in the Thought of Martin Luther King, Jr.', page 89:

     As he said in "I Have a Dream," the Negro "lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity."

• centre, center, middle

midst

1. (rare) Among, in the middle of; amid.

   (Can we find and add a quotation of Shakespeare to this entry?)

• For quotations of use of this term, see Citations:midst.

• amid
• amidst

• in the midst of
• in one's midst

• DTIMs, MSTID, Smidt