mainstream

Forms

1.Used or accepted broadly rather than by small portions of population, market, scientific community, etc.
- They often carry stories you won't find in the mainstream media.
- If Ms. Le Pen looks more mainstream now, it’s because the mainstream looks more like her.
- As unsubstantiated claims receive significant backing, skeptics and defenders of mainstream science enter the fray.

1.The principal current in a flow, such as a river or flow of air
2.That which is common; the norm.
- "Railways seldom slavishly followed styles to be seen in the mainstream of contemporary architecture," HE [Historic England] explains.
- George Herbert Walker Bush of Phillips Andover Academy and Yale University proclaimed in the first Presidential candidates' debate that he was “in touch with the mainstream of America.”
- Long content with being the BMW of the computer industry, suppying finely crafted machines to a relatively small number of fanatic customers, Apple now wants to become a Ford or Toyota, to move into the mainstream.

1.To educate (a disabled student) together with non-disabled students.
- Despite these beliefs, the decision to send my son to a regular school was not made easily. I didn't know of any child as disabled as he who had been mainstreamed.
2.To popularize, to normalize, to render mainstream.
- Acknowledging the role X plays in mainstreaming the worst constituencies makes for awkward conversations with those who continue to use it.
- Just as the gang peace movement desired to mainstream hardcore bangers into civic society, The Chronic wanted to drive hardcore rap into the popstream.
3.To become mainstream.
- In a nonchurch context, we can look more explicitly at formerly New Age practices to see if and how they have mainstreamed.

Uncommon· #3489

From main + stream.

Cognate with Icelandic meginstraumur (“a main current, mainstream”).