Mid is the most deflating word in modern slang, and that's the point. It doesn't say something is bad. It says it's average, and usually that it's less good than everyone keeps saying. "Everyone hyped that restaurant up but honestly it was mid."

It's a shortening of "middle", and its history is less polished than its current use. Dictionary.com notes that in the early 2000s "mid" described mid-grade cannabis, neither strong nor weak, before the word left that context behind. By the early 2010s it had spread to anything mediocre, though at first mostly among people who knew the cannabis sense: Dictionary.com quotes a January 2012 tweet calling a playlist "mid". Wiktionary labels the slang as originally African American Vernacular English and internet slang.

From 2019 it spread more widely on social media, and in the early 2020s TikTok made it a favourite way to deflate hype. Wiktionary's citations show how far it travelled: NPR used it in 2021, and the New York Times in 2024 described some TV shows as "simply … mid".

Its power lies in what it doesn't say. Hatred at least takes something seriously. Mid gives it a shrug. That's why "it's mid" can start an argument faster than "it's terrible".