So-so describes something that's neither good nor bad, just somewhere in the middle. If someone asks how your day was and you shrug and say “so-so,” you mean it was okay but nothing special. Maybe you had fun at recess but struggled through a math quiz. Not terrible, not great, just average.

The word captures that feeling of being underwhelmed or unimpressed. When a movie is so-so, you don't regret watching it, but you probably won't remember it next week. A so-so sandwich fills you up without tasting particularly good or bad. A so-so performance on a test means you passed but didn't excel.

People often use so-so with a hand gesture, tilting their flat hand back and forth like a seesaw to show something is balancing between good and bad. The word itself sounds like what it means: repeating the same syllable twice creates a feeling of something just going along without any excitement or disappointment, like waves gently rocking a boat that's not really going anywhere.