muck
Americannoun
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moist farmyard dung, decaying vegetable matter, etc.; manure.
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a highly organic, dark or black soil, less than 50 percent combustible, often used as a manure.
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mire; mud.
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filth, dirt, or slime.
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defamatory or sullying remarks.
-
a state of chaos or confusion.
to make a muck of things.
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Chiefly British Informal. something of no value; trash.
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(especially in mining) earth, rock, or other useless matter to be removed in order to get out the mineral or other substances sought.
verb (used with object)
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mucks,
present (3rd person singular)
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mucked,
past participle, past
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mucking
present participle
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to manure.
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to make dirty; soil.
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to remove muck from (sometimes followed byout ).
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Informal.
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to ruin; bungle (often followed byup ).
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to put into a state of complete confusion (often followed byup ).
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verb phrase
noun
verb
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to spread manure upon (fields, gardens, etc)
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to soil or pollute
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(often foll by out) to clear muck from
Other Word Forms
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
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mucksimple
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muckssimple
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have muckedperfect
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has muckedperfect
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am muckingprogressive
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are muckingprogressive
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is muckingprogressive
-
have been muckingperfect progressive
-
has been muckingperfect progressive
Past
-
muckedsimple
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had muckedperfect
-
was muckingprogressive
-
were muckingprogressive
-
had been muckingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of muck
1200–50; Middle English muc, muk < Old Norse myki cow dung
Explanation
Muck is a goopy, muddy substance, like the muck at the bottom of a pond or the muck you clean out of the gutters on your house once a year. You can also use muck to mean animal manure, its original, 13th-century meaning — specifically, "cow dung and vegetable matter used as manure." The definition has expanded since then to include any number of dirty, slimy substances, from the mud on the bottom of a lake to the sludge in a flooded basement. As a verb, to muck is either to remove animal waste or to spread manure on a field.
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:
You don’t want to muck bait it and drag it out for the sake of dragging it out.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 22, 2026
A resident in the area, who asked not to be named, told the BBC a muck spreader, which are normally used to distribute farmyard manure, had been used to spread medical waste.
From BBC ● Sep. 8, 2026
Here’s another running bit that would be so easy to muck up or exploit.
From Salon ● Jul. 12, 2026
Laura Stacey’s quote flags Canada’s strategy: muck it up.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 17, 2026
He eased both sets of arms onto the muck at the shore, press' ing each seven-fingered hand into the shine of the mud.
From "The Girl Who Drank the Moon" by Kelly Barnhill
The film "mucks up Orwell", according to the Wall Street Journal,, external who surmised: "As comedy, the movie is feeble, and as allegory for the socioeconomically literate it is heavy-handed."
From BBC ● Jul. 13, 2026
To the public, Zucker is the one- or two-season guest star who joins the workplace drama ensemble and mucks up the joint.
From Salon ● Feb. 4, 2022
The banter mucks around as happily in the psychological mud as it does in the corporate slime.
From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 2, 2021
Their clandestine love brings some bucolic light and energy to a movie that often mucks about in Mikolasek’s dim, gray clinic.
From New York Times ● Jul. 22, 2021
Carbonate and sulphate of lime are large ingredients of the ashes of about one-half, of the thirty-three peats and swamp mucks I have examined.
From Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel by Samuel W. (Samuel William) Johnson
As she tells it, she was depicting a fantasy, and people didn’t need their fantasies mucked up by seeing the whole truth.
From Salon ● Jul. 10, 2026
These shows are much more vital when the cast stops fighting or toiling in the same drama they’ve been mucked in for years.
From Salon ● Mar. 5, 2025
That’s the way nature designed it and how it worked for thousands of years until humans mucked it up — mostly as we overpopulated California after World War II.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 29, 2024
Trainer has organised a minibus for 8am to take stable staff to Aintree on Saturday after they have mucked out and ridden horses at his stables near Cardiff.
From BBC ● Apr. 13, 2023
Brits must say mucked up instead of messed up.
From "Silent To The Bone" by E.L. Konigsburg
The wild card in the movie, and one whose fierce devotion to mucking things up isn’t well explained, is Barry Keoghan as a motorbike-riding blond agent of chaos, Ormon.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 12, 2026
He also examined the history of those peculiar twists and turns on the city perimeter, mucking through L.A.’s long-simmering stew of real estate grabs, water politics and annexation schemes.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 25, 2025
As Ms Hall was busy draining off the pasta in the sink, her partner of 27 years and their daughter were "mucking about by the back door".
From BBC ● Mar. 12, 2025
Her parents had said they were all "mucking about" and throwing grapes at each other in the kitchen while Ms Hall was making spaghetti Bolognese.
From BBC ● Feb. 10, 2025
I can hear her mucking around in there, and I call out to see if she needs any help.
From "I Am the Messenger" by Markus Zusak
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