Mediocrity

How to spell mediocrity

10 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce mediocrity

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mediocrity mean?

1. nounThe quality of being average or second-rate, lacking distinction or excellence.

Mediocrity in a sentence

• The manager refused to accept mediocrity from his sales team.

• Years of underfunding had dragged the once-famous school into mediocrity.

Where does mediocrity come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word descends from the Latin mediocritas, an abstract noun meaning a middle state or moderation, which was built on the adjective mediocris. That adjective carries a wonderfully vivid literal picture: it joins medius, meaning 'middle', with ocris, an old word for a rugged mountain or rocky peak, so a person who was mediocris was imagined standing 'halfway up the mountain', neither at the bottom nor at the summit. In classical Latin the idea of the middle position was often a virtue, the prized golden mean of moderation, but English took a darker view. The word arrived through French (mediocrite) in the late 1500s, and by then 'middling' had shaded into 'second-rate' or 'merely ordinary'. The spelling trap lives in that buried mountain root: the unstressed 'i' before the loud 'oc' and the soft 'c' pronounced like a 'k' both tempt writers to drop a letter or swap the spelling.

How the word is built

• medi- (from medius: middle)
• ocr- (from ocris: rugged mountain)
• -ity (noun-forming suffix)