mire
Americannoun
-
mires
plural
verb (used with object)
-
mires,
present (3rd person singular)
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mired,
past participle, past
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miring
present participle
-
to plunge and fix in mire; cause to stick fast in mire.
-
to involve; entangle.
-
to soil with mire; bespatter with mire.
verb (used without object)
-
mires,
present (3rd person singular)
-
mired,
past participle, past
-
miring
present participle
noun
-
a boggy or marshy area
-
mud, muck, or dirt
verb
-
to sink or cause to sink in a mire
-
(tr) to make dirty or muddy
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(tr) to involve, esp in difficulties
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
-
miresimple
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miressimple
-
have miredperfect
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has miredperfect
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am miringprogressive
-
are miringprogressive
-
is miringprogressive
-
have been miringperfect progressive
-
has been miringperfect progressive
Past
-
miredsimple
-
had miredperfect
-
was miringprogressive
-
were miringprogressive
-
had been miringperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of mire
First recorded in 1300–50; Middle English, from Old Norse mȳrr “bog”; cognate with Old English mēos moss
Explanation
A mire is mushy ground like quicksand, so if you feel yourself trapped in a sticky situation, consider yourself mired. One gets mired IN something — like in a dispute or in a love triangle. Mire still has its original, though less-used, sense of a slushy, muddy bit of land that gives way underfoot, also known as a quagmire. One of the most famous mires in literary history was the one haunted by the Hound of the Baskervilles in Conan Doyle's classic. Have the fibs you told your beloved come back to haunt you? You're stuck in a mire then, a treacherous situation it's going to be pretty hard to squirm out of.
Vocabulary lists containing mire
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
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"Shooting an Elephant" by George Orwell
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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:
Earlier on Sunday, a late Alexis Claude Maurice penalty took Augsburg to a 1-0 home win over rock-bottom Heidenheim, lifting the hosts six points clear of the relegation mire.
From Barron's ● Feb. 15, 2026
But after reading “The Dream Factory,” you might like him better when he still had his feet in the Shoreditch mire.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 7, 2025
Lesser biographies pick sides; Mangold trusts us to find our own path through the mire, while noting the particular risk of being a wunderkind hoisted up into a deity.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 24, 2025
When Root played a limp shot to chop on in the same over, England were in the mire.
From BBC ● Nov. 29, 2024
The rain fell upon us; and we waited in the mire for time to pass so we might make our dash across the flats.
From "The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party" by M.T. Anderson
It earnestly evokes the way grief mires us in memory, making us feel as if our personal timelines are slip-sliding and looping, eternally arrested in the past.
From New York Times ● Apr. 11, 2024
But there's no small amount of controversy when it comes to marshes, mires, fens, bogs, vernal pools, prairie ponds, pocosins, sloughs, small streams, seasonal streams, and rain-dependent streams.
From Salon ● May 2, 2023
As society mires its way out of the COVID-19 pandemic, health coverage has come into sharp focus for all.
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 27, 2022
In addition, FEO is using satellites to monitor water levels over time in EU-protected boreal wetlands called appa mires.
From Science Magazine ● Nov. 17, 2021
There was running water at the bottom: it was in fact the bed of one of the many small rivers that trickled down from the hills to feed the stagnant pools and mires beyond.
From "The Two Towers" by J. R. R. Tolkien
Last year the contest was mired in scandal after it was noticed that some contestants' stones were suspiciously circular.
From BBC ● Sep. 4, 2026
Meanwhile, "the opposition has been too mired in internal and legal issues to really articulate a difference" between their policies and Tinubu's, said Adekaiyaoja.
From Barron's ● Aug. 19, 2026
Indeed, it is almost revolutionary to see emotionally resonant teenage characters who aren’t mired in abuse, addiction or some kind of horror; leveraging dysfunction has become shorthand for “drama.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 13, 2026
Every item is mired in internal arguments over priorities and strategy.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 16, 2026
There had been some Rain & the Earth of the Road was soft & his Desk was somewhat mired as he leaned upon it.
From "The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party" by M.T. Anderson
He dropped to 24-43 in four seasons in Jacksonville, falling a few plays shy of the franchise’s first Super Bowl in 2017 and then miring near the bottom of the league since.
From Seattle Times ● Jan. 3, 2021
Plaintiffs’ lawyers want to avoid miring their clients’ cases in lengthy courtroom wrangling over requests that filings be sealed or redacted.
From Reuters ● Jun. 25, 2019
The resin puddled and pooled, miring countless creatures "like a mini–La Brea Tar Pits," says paleontologist Ryan McKellar at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Regina, Canada.
From Science Magazine ● May 23, 2019
Connell and Marianne are not free, and Normal People becomes a tender, bruised meditation on how two people can keep miring themselves in misery even when happiness is within their reach.
From Slate ● Apr. 15, 2019
The discoveries once again fractured the consensus about the early American history, miring it in dispute.
From "1491" by Charles C. Mann
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.
