middle-aged

Age as a plain fact, the sense of witness statements and descriptions of a person: someone either falls in this bracket or does not, so it is not graded with more or most. The spelling took time to settle. Collins, writing in 1676, called Leibnitz "scarce yet middle aged" in two open words, while Steele's Tatler already hyphenates it in 1709. The hyphen is now the norm.

Here the word stops measuring years and starts judging style, which is why it can be graded: more middle-aged, a little middle-aged, almost middle-aged. It applies to things as readily as to people. Lowell praises Cowper's poetry "in its own middle-aged way," and Ruskin writes of an "almost middle-aged aspect." Unlike the plain age sense, it usually carries a mild verdict of staidness, as with a beige color scheme that seems too sober for a young artist.

A lost rival to medieval, built on the Middle Ages rather than on a lifespan. Hearne's "middle-ag'd Antiquities" (1710) and the "middle-aged Latin" of 1845 both mean belonging to that era. The sense has not survived, and readers now hear only the age-of-life meaning, so Mitford's "middle-aged Greek" (1804) sounds like a man of forty-five. Write medieval instead, and keep this sense for quoting older texts.