The term had previously appeared in hyphenated form in The Nation, on 25 January 1912:
It consists of people who are hoping that some day they will get used to the stuff that they ought to like". According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word middlebrow first appeared in print in 1925, in Punch: "The BBC claims to have discovered a new type-'the middlebrow'. The opposite of highbrow is lowbrow, and between them is middlebrow, describing culture that is neither high nor low as a usage, middlebrow is derogatory, as in Virginia Woolf's unsent letter to the New Statesman, written in the 1930s and published in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942). The term was popularized in 1902 by Will Irvin, a reporter for The Sun of New York City, who adhered to the phrenological notion of more intelligent people having high foreheads. The first usage in print of highbrow was recorded in 1884. The term highbrow is considered by some (with corresponding labels as 'middlebrow' 'lowbrow') as discerning or selective and highbrow is currently distanced from the writer by quotation marks: "We thus focus on the consumption of two generally recognised 'highbrow' genres-opera and classical". "Highbrow" can be applied to music, implying most of the classical music tradition to literature-i.e., literary fiction and poetry to films in the arthouse line and to comedy that requires significant understanding of analogies or references to appreciate.
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