Describes books, films, TV programmes, music and so on that are fairly serious and fairly good, but not hard. They are made for ordinary educated people who want something with a bit of thought in it, but do not want to work. A famous novel that everyone can finish, a history documentary on TV at eight o'clock, a piano album of famous tunes — middlebrow. It sits between 'highbrow' (difficult, for people with a lot of education — modern poetry, three-hour films with no story) and 'lowbrow' (easy fun, no thinking asked — action films, gossip magazines). Two things matter about how the word is used. First, it is nearly always a criticism, and often an unkind one. When someone calls a book middlebrow, they usually mean: it pretends to be art, it makes the reader feel clever, but it is really safe and comfortable. Highbrow and lowbrow can both be said with a smile; middlebrow is the one nobody wants to be. Second, it says as much about the speaker as about the thing — it is a word for looking down, so it appears mostly in reviews, in newspapers, and in the talk of people who write about culture. Ordinary people rarely say it about what they themselves watch. It can also be a noun, for the taste itself or for a person with it ('the middlebrow'), but the describing use is far more common. All three words come from an old and now discredited idea that a high forehead meant a clever person.

中等文化品味的、不高不低的（通常帶貶意，說東西「看起來有點深度其實很安全」）；與 highbrow 高眉／陽春白雪、lowbrow 低俗／下里巴人相對