Definition of "midst"

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

She puts the period often from his place ; And 'midst the sentence so her accent breaks

1594, William Shakespeare, Lucrece (First Quarto), London: […] Richard Field, for Iohn Harrison, […]