What does “mid” mean?
- Fans of Gordon Ramsay’s cooking shows are used to hearing him use the word “mid” as an abbreviation for “medium,” particularly when it comes to the ideal temperature of a steak: mid-rare.
- The “midpoint” of a line is exactly halfway between its beginning and end.
- Dictionaries define “mid” as “the part in the middle.”
TikTok users don’t usually rely on celebrity chefs, mathematicians, or dictionaries to tell them what acronyms, abbreviations, and other terms mean, though. That’s why posts on the social media platform can be so confusing for people who’ve just signed up for a TikTok account; they often have no idea what the words on a post or in a video are supposed to mean.
We’re here to help.
What Does Mid Mean on TikTok?
Many words and phrases commonly heard in Gen Z and Gen A conversations have made their way onto the app. Cheugy, cringe, and delulu (all used as denigrating or derogatory adjectives) are just a few that you’d hear in middle school, high school, and college hallways, and they’re all everyday insults used in TikTok posts as well.
Add “Mid” to the list.
The term doesn’t mean medium, average, or any other simile you can think of. It’s used as a slam in TikTok content (and in the hallways we mentioned), meaning mediocre, underwhelming, or below-par. It’s used to describe music, movies, clubs, scenery, TV and streaming shows, even people. In text comments, it’s often accompanied by an eye-roll emoji.
Strangely enough, the widespread use of “mid” appears to have originated in 2021 with a viral TikTok clip of an AEW championship wrestler, Jacob Friedman. He screamed the word at an Ohio crowd that was booing him at one of his shows, saying, “It’s called the Midwest because every single thing in it is ‘mid!’”
Two weeks later, a TikTok user distorted the audio and added sound effects. The resulting TikTok video immediately scored hundreds of thousands of views, and a trend was born. Millions of people uploaded posts describing everything they could think of that they considered “mid.”
To be honest, many of the viral videos were mid, too — but the term has stuck and is still very commonly used on the app today.
About the Author
Peter Hasselworth is a contributor at iDigic, sharing valuable insights about Instagram growth and social media marketing strategies.