Midterm

How to spell midterm

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce midterm

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does midterm mean?

1. adjectiveOccurring in the middle of a fixed period, such as a term of office or a school term.
2. nounAn examination taken halfway through an academic course or semester.

Midterm in a sentence

• adjective

  The company published a midterm review of its annual budget.

• noun

  She stayed up late revising for her chemistry midterm.

• adjective

  Voters delivered a sharp verdict in the midterm elections.

• noun

  The professor returned the marked midterm at the start of class.

Where does midterm come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent compound formed inside English from two old elements. The first part, mid-, comes from Old English midd, meaning 'middle', a thoroughly Germanic element that also gives us 'midday', 'midnight' and 'midway'. The second part, 'term', arrived from Latin terminus, meaning 'a boundary, limit or end point', which passed into English through Old French as terme; over time it came to name a fixed stretch of time bounded at each end, such as a school term or a politician's term of office. Joined together, midterm literally points to the middle of such a bounded period. The word is largely an American coinage of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where it took on two everyday senses: an examination held halfway through a course, and the elections held halfway through a presidential term. The spelling is mercifully regular, written as one solid word with no hyphen and no doubled letters.

How the word is built

• mid- (middle)
• term (a fixed period, as in a school term or term of office)