midst

Etymology

From Middle English middes, midst, myddest (“middle”), from Old English midde, reshaped in Middle English phrases like in middes (“in the middle”) by analogy with adverbs in -(e)s; also compare Old English on middan, tōmiddes. Forms in -(e)st are probably due to influence of superlatives.

noun

1. (often literary) A place in the middle of something; may be used of a literal or metaphorical location.
   Miss Phyllis Morgan, as the hapless heroine dressed in the shabbiest of clothes, appears in the midst of a gay and giddy throng; she apostrophises all and sundry there, including the villain, and has a magnificent scene which always brings down the house, and nightly adds to her histrionic laurels. 1905, Baroness Emmuska Orczy, chapter 2, in The Affair at the Novelty Theatre
   At dawn, in the midst of a mist that is both literal and the unformed shifting of thought, he encounters a young fox pup playfully shaking a bone. 1995, Mary Ellen Pitts, Toward a Dialogue of Understandings: Loren Eiseley and the Critique of Science, page 225
   As he said in "I Have a Dream," the Negro "lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity." 2002, Nathan W. Schlueter, quoting Martin Luther King, Jr., I Have a Dream, 1963, speech, quoted in One Dream Or Two?: Justice in America and in the Thought of Martin Luther King, Jr., page 89

prep

1. (rare) Among, in the middle of; amid.