muckrake
Americanverb (used without object)
noun
verb
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of muckrake
First recorded in 1675–85; obsolete muck rake “a rake for piling up muck or dung.” The modern sense was first recorded in 1850–55. See muck, rake 1
Explanation
To muckrake is to write stories revealing scandals about politicians and other powerful people. If you want to muckrake for a living, try getting a job writing for a tabloid. Someone who muckrakes is called a muckraker, and their job is to investigate public figures and expose anything they discover that's illegal or unethical. Many journalists muckrake during political campaigns, reporting on personal scandals, corruption, and sometimes simply gossip. The term muckrake initially meant, literally, "to rake muck," but in 1906 President Roosevelt popularized the "investigative reporting" meaning of the word.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
She wasn’t there to muckrake but to grasp what happens when the object of laboratory study is not a molecule or a rat but a human being.
From The New Yorker ● Dec. 29, 2018
And it’s not just foreign operatives that we must beware of - deep-pocketed special interests here can muckrake online with little or no accountability, too.
From Washington Times ● May 9, 2018
At the 1906 Gridiron Club dinner in Washington, President Theodore Roosevelt first likened crusading journalists to a man with "the muckrake in his hand."
From US News ● Mar. 17, 2015
In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt first likened crusading journalists to a man with “the muckrake in his hand” in a speech to the Gridiron Club in Washington.
From Washington Post ● Mar. 17, 2011
For, behold, the muckrake is likewise visible in all.
From The Fiend's Delight by Bierce, Ambrose
Wells muckraked the failings of the press, in other words.
From Salon ● Oct. 6, 2024
Samuel Hopkins Adams muckraked the patent-medicine industry, and Congress swiftly enacted the Pure Food and Drug Act.
From Time Magazine Archive
The great muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair once said it was pretty much impossible to convince somebody of something if their money depended on them not believing or understanding it.
From MarketWatch ● Jun. 30, 2026
“The seasoned families will never live on apartment house terms, like larvae in a honeycomb,” wrote the muckraking journalist Will Irwin in 1927.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 23, 2026
Woodward and Bernstein had just changed the world with their muckraking, and what was I doing with my brand-new degree in journalism?
From Los Angeles Times ● May 3, 2025
Jim Hightower, the former Texas agriculture commissioner who later gained prominence as a muckraking progressive journalist, was the keynote speaker at the 2000 Greens convention.
From Slate ● Jul. 4, 2023
He saw himself as a muckraking gadfly and had mortgaged his brownstone five times to keep The Phoenix going.
From "The Glass Castle" by Jeannette Walls
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
