middle distance


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middle distance

n.
1. The area between the foreground and background in a painting, drawing, or photograph. Also called middle ground.
2. Sports A division of competition in racing with events usually ranging from 400 meters to 1,500 meters or from 440 yards to 1 mile.
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

mid′dle dis′tance


n.
1. the represented space between the foreground and background in paintings and drawings.
2. (in track) a race distance ranging from 400 meters or 440 yards to 1 mile.
[1805–15]
Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary, © 2010 K Dictionaries Ltd. Copyright 2005, 1997, 1991 by Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.

middle distance

(or middle ground) The represented space in a picture between background and foreground.
Dictionary of Unfamiliar Words by Diagram Group Copyright © 2008 by Diagram Visual Information Limited
ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:
Noun1.middle distance - the part of a scene between the foreground and the backgroundmiddle distance - the part of a scene between the foreground and the background
panorama, vista, view, aspect, scene, prospect - the visual percept of a region; "the most desirable feature of the park are the beautiful views"
Based on WordNet 3.0, Farlex clipart collection. © 2003-2012 Princeton University, Farlex Inc.
Translations

middle distance

n (Art) in the middle distancein secondo piano
Collins Italian Dictionary 1st Edition © HarperCollins Publishers 1995
References in classic literature ?
The atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged with azure that what artists call the middle distance partakes also of that hue, while the horizon beyond is of the deepest ultramarine.
As he stood there, gazing into the middle distance, an individual of dishevelled aspect sidled up, a vagrant of almost the maximum seediness, from whose midriff there protruded a trayful of a strange welter of collar-studs, shoe-laces, rubber rings, buttonhooks, and dying roosters.
In the middle distance symmetrical mounds of woolly green moss bounded by croquet hoops formed the base of shrubs shaped like orange-trees but studded with large pink and red roses.
Suddenly the sun sank behind the Island of Elba, the lane of dancing sunlight was instantaneously quenched and swallowed in the trackless waste, and in the middle distance, already miles astern, either my sight deceived me or a black speck bobbed amid the gray.
It came to a standstill in the middle distance, and there it had been planned that Tibby should meet her, and drive her, and a tea-basket, up to join them.
A group of dark Scotch firs was introduced in the middle distance to relieve the prevailing freshness of the rest; but in the foreground was part of the gnarled trunk and of the spreading boughs of a large forest- tree, whose foliage was of a brilliant golden green - not golden from autumnal mellowness, but from the sunshine and the very immaturity of the scarce expanded leaves.
It was addressing the head Shipping-Master who, having let me in, had, apparently, remained hovering in the middle distance ever since "Mr.
Above the date- plumes in the middle distance, swelled a domed and pinnacled mass, glimmering through a tinted, exquisite mist; away toward the horizon a dozen shapely pyramids watched over ruined Memphis: and at our feet the bland impassible Sphynx looked out upon the picture from her throne in the sands as placidly and pensively as she had looked upon its like full fifty lagging centuries ago.
When the French temperament sees a man running rapidly and pointing into the middle distance and hears him shouting, ' La!
In the middle distance lay the golf links, dotted as they had been in the morning with the dark figures of the golfers, lying motionless upon the grass of the course or among the heather which skirted it.
In the foreground was the long slope, strewn with rocks and dotted with tree-ferns; farther off in the middle distance, looking over the saddle-back hill, I could just see the yellow and green mass of bamboos through which we had passed; and then, gradually, the vegetation increased until it formed the huge forest which extended as far as the eyes could reach, and for a good two thousand miles beyond.
You think your husband is a great man now because they are beginning to talk of his foregrounds and middle distances in the newspaper columns that nobody reads.