The middle of something is the point at an equal distance from both ends or all sides — the middle of the room, the middle of the night, the middle of the book.
It is a noun with the and an adjective before a noun: in the middle, the middle child, middle age. The distinction from centre is worth having: centre is precise and often geometric, middle is loose and often about time. The centre of a circle is a point; the middle of the afternoon is a region. Note middle-aged, which is hyphenated as an adjective, and the fixed compounds middle name, middle class, Middle Ages, all of which carry meanings you could not guess from the parts.
1nouncentreThe part at an equal distance from the ends or sides.~2%
“There was a stain in the middle of the tablecloth.”
synonyms: centre, midpoint
2adjectivemiddlePlaced between two others.~88%
“She is the middle child of three.”
3nounperiodThe part of a period of time between its beginning and its end.~10%
“It rained through the middle of the week.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 10 sentences found in the wild and placed 10 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
middle is a position.
Old English middel goes back to a Proto-Germanic root that also gives Latin medius and Greek mesos. The same ancient word sits inside medium, mediocre, mediterranean — the sea in the middle of the land — and midnight.
Middle English
myddel
English, today
middle
Built from
From Middle English myddel. From Middle English myddel, middel, from Old English middel (“middle, centre, waist”), from Proto-Germanic midlą, midilą, medalą (“middle”), a diminutive of Proto-Germanic midjō (“middle, midst”) (compare midjaz (“mid, middle”)), from Proto-Indo-European médʰyos (“between, in the middle, middle”). 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA