How to Use middling in a Sentence

middling

1 of 2 adjective

• So far, the unit has been middling at best.
  — Mike Kaye september 10, Charlotte Observer, 10 Sep. 2025
• This team is going nowhere, a middling play-in team.
  — Ira Winderman, Sun Sentinel, 24 Jan. 2026
• It's been long enough of middling baseball.
  — Jackson Roberts, MSNBC Newsweek, 12 Aug. 2025
• But the results were still middling.
  — Kevin Acee, San Diego Union-Tribune, 15 Aug. 2025
• Even its middling nights are crushing.
  — Joel Lorenzi, New York Times, 20 Apr. 2026
• Anything that’s just middling won’t stick.
  — Brian Welk, IndieWire, 20 Oct. 2025
• Prigozhin, by then an oligarch of middling rank, saw an opening.
  — Joshua Yaffa, The New Yorker, 24 June 2023
• The best thing to say about this middling installment is that its heart is in the right place.
  — Dallas News, 29 Sep. 2022
• His record is middling, with just three half-centuries in 26 knocks.
  — Sam Dalling, New York Times, 7 Oct. 2025
• What exactly does middling-plus–one get you?
  — Ira Winderman, Sun Sentinel, 19 Aug. 2025
• As the other East middling teams decide time for change.
  — Ira Winderman, Sun Sentinel, 4 Feb. 2026
• Gu landed a middling run the first time, then fell off the third rail on her second attempt.
  — New York Times, 14 Feb. 2022
• This wasn’t just some middling offense that got shut down by a great defense, either.
  — Kyle Feldscher, CNN Money, 9 Feb. 2026
• The neutral-court loss to a middling Baylor team.
  — Tom Krasovic, San Diego Union-Tribune, 16 Mar. 2026
• It’s been long enough of middling baseball – as far as overall team wins and losses.
  — Bill Plunkett, Oc Register, 12 Aug. 2025
• Broadcast shows offer easy pleasures, and this tends to be true of the middling ones as well as the best.
  — Robert Lloyd, Anchorage Daily News, 6 Oct. 2022
• Clary was productive two years ago on a middling Penn State team.
  — Cj Moore, New York Times, 1 Oct. 2025
• Smith was the head coach of a middling South Dakota program at the time.
  — Kevin Reynolds, The Salt Lake Tribune, 4 Mar. 2022
• Even with name and nose changes, most of the great Jewish stage stars of the era had middling film careers.
  — Jesse Green, New York Times, 28 Nov. 2023
• Eking out a win, even a middling one, the studio chose its cut as the one to go into theaters.
  — Borys Kit, HollywoodReporter, 3 July 2026
• One of the few middling reviews Rushdie received was from his father.
  — David Remnick, The New Yorker, 6 Feb. 2023
• So what makes a middling rental into something that a hedge funder would want to drop a few million on?
  — Curbed, 2 Oct. 2023
• Johnson said the Cowboys could make a run if the team can just improve to middling.
  — Lawrence Dow, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 29 Jan. 2026
• Dedicated fans who have come back again and again despite some middling teams.
  — Marc Weiszer, Athens Banner-Herald, 14 Oct. 2025
• Since then, a middling season has turned into one of Denver's best.
  — Alex Wilcox, CBS News, 6 Apr. 2026
• Vancouver was a middling team in 2024 and fired their head coach.
  — Tom Bogert, New York Times, 30 Nov. 2025
• Such is the reality of a middling team in the midst of a middling season.
  — Ira Winderman, Sun Sentinel, 12 Apr. 2023
• The league was still older at that point and the Warriors were still a middling team in the West.
  — Shane Young, Forbes, 25 June 2022
• Goncharenko said a middling package of sanctions won't hurt Putin.
  — Peter Weber, The Week, 24 Feb. 2022
• But that can’t quite get The Son past the middling dramatic scenes that take up so much of the movie.
  — K. Austin Collins, Rolling Stone, 19 Jan. 2023

middling

2 of 2 noun

• As with the other drills, the results ranged from middling (that was mine) to quite good.
  — Dan Morrison, USA Today, 26 July 2025
• And yet audiences don’t seem to care about the middling notices.
  — Brent Lang, Variety, 29 Mar. 2024
• Teams with middling to good talent must wring every ounce out of their abilities to beat great teams.
  — Andrew Callahan, Boston Herald, 20 Nov. 2025
• There were lines around the block for the most middling of apartments; people were raising their own rents to try to get an edge over other applicants.
  — Clio Chang, Curbed, 5 Nov. 2025
• Inevitably, many middling and smaller powers will straddle divides and seek to balance their ties to greater powers.
  — Shivshankar Menon, Foreign Affairs, 3 Aug. 2022
• There were excuses for last season, but this time around, there will be no acceptance of middling, muddling mediocrity.
  — Scott Ostler, SFChronicle.com, 19 Dec. 2020
• But reviews have generally remained fair to middling, and the brand has grown to seem more like an afterthought in recent years.
  — Tony Sachs, Robb Report, 24 May 2021
• This middle-aged — and middling — actor originally came to Tokyo to star in a big toothpaste commercial.
  — Jocelyn Noveck, Boston Herald, 21 Nov. 2025
• Pinto, however, believes that higher borrowing costs will cause a middling rather than catastrophic drop in the ranks of purchasers.
  — Shawn Tully, Fortune, 26 June 2022
• Paying middling free agents at positions that already have respectable starters and flexibility for draft maneuvering is a fool’s errand in some respects.
  — Mike Kaye, Charlotte Observer, 11 Feb. 2025
• There are a lot of NHL teams making a lot of changes because of injuries to their starting goalies this season — and not just the ceremonies to honor middling milestones.
  — Jimmy Golen, The Denver Post, 22 Jan. 2020
• Josh Richardson, in exchange for Seth Curry, appears primed to be a starter who upgrades the Mavericks’ middling defense.
  — Callie Caplan, Dallas News, 2 Dec. 2020
• Despite the Broncos middling season overall, Monday’s matchup should be entertaining.
  — Ian Firstenberg, Chicago Tribune, 17 Oct. 2022
• The Edmonton Oilers have officially transitioned from a middling, underachieving group to their rightful status as a contender that just finds ways to win.
  — Daniel Nugent-Bowman, The Athletic, 20 Dec. 2024
• McGraw wishes aid for the Chiefs and Royals would be weighed separately, given the Royals’ middling on-field performance.
  — Jonathan Shorman, Kansas City Star, 29 Mar. 2024
• Somewhere middling in the postmatch emotional spectrum was Victor Marks-Jenkins (157).
  — Sam Cohn, Baltimore Sun, 3 Mar. 2024
• The Portland Thorns are riding high at the top of the league table, even while missing several key players, and will face a Kansas City side down on their luck and middling at the bottom of the league table.
  — oregonlive, 1 Aug. 2021
• More recent investments by other tech companies into VR experiences — sometimes called the metaverse — have generally been regarded as middling at best.
  — Sara Ruberg, NBC News, 5 June 2023
• Even with a nice win Tuesday, the Warriors’ middling and chaotic start to this campaign has left no reasonable doubt — the Warriors are in an era of transition, with all the counterbalancing ups and downs that will come along with it.
  — Dieter Kurtenbach, The Mercury News, 3 Jan. 2024
• So much pain and loss has been inflicted on the Russian people through staggering war casualties that delivering middling to poor results might significantly limit the longevity of Russia’s leadership.
  — Nick Paton Walsh, CNN Money, 19 May 2025