in the midst
218
3.6
- idiom
:
en medio de
- In the midst of the celebration, everyone forgot about the rain.
- in the midst of a crisis
- in the midst of war
- in the midst of battle
He became the greatest president in the midst of trials.
- He became the greatest president in the midst of trials.
- And this is right in the midst of the civil rights movement.
- We're now in the midst of shooting our fourth season.
- You may just be in the midst of the acute cleanup phase.
- All right, so we were in the midst of talking about symmetry.
- We can find the tiny lost diamond in the midst of the devastation.
- He understands that we are in the midst of an unprecedented crisis.
- And it can be hard to see that in the midst of feeling hurt and disappointed.
- He's behaving that way in the midst of other people.
- So we really are in the midst of a renaissance again.
- So then they take the company public in the midst of this tailwind.
- And we'll return to that topic in the midst of this discussion.
- And it always grows in the midst of persecution.
- The American emancipation occurred, never forget, in the midst of all out civil war.
- I mean, we are in the midst of this communications revolution right now.
Examples
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You are in the midst of life.
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And that we are in the midst of crisis is not well understood.
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And this is right in the midst of the civil rights movement.
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But we're in the, you know, we're in the midst of this shift.
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We're now in the midst of shooting our fourth season.
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So we really are in the midst of a renaissance again.
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I think we're in the midst of a transformation.
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It's hard to have clear thoughts in the midst of extreme pain and suffering.
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The Canadian economy is currently in the midst of a period of unparalleled economic change.
Academic text (1999) -
Major news networks begin to speculate if America was in the midst of a terror attack.
Synonyms
∞
1.0
In the middle of a group of people or things
196
1.0
In the middle of things happening, often during a busy or difficult time
60
1.3
In the middle of other things and surrounded by them
How Central
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly compositional: 'in' (inside) + 'midst' (the center or middle of something) with 'the' as a determiner, so the sense 'in the middle/among' follows naturally from the constituents. This construction is cross-linguistically common and therefore a B1 learner who knows the component words would readily infer the MWE's meaning.
Etymology
In the midst comes from the old word midst, which means the middle of something. Imagine standing inside a circle of people or a camp in a forest, surrounded on all sides, and that is why in the midst means 'in the middle' or 'among' people or things.