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.
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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:
Here’s another running bit that would be so easy to muck up or exploit.
From Salon ● Jul. 12, 2026
But as Cara Giaimo writes for Slate, algae enthusiasts are finding tremendous joy in all the muck.
From Slate ● Jun. 29, 2026
The streets of America did not need to be paved with gold; it would suffice to be less mired in muck.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 16, 2026
“Like slime, sludge, and muck, slop has the wet sound of something you don’t want to touch,” the editors continued.
From Salon ● Jan. 13, 2026
Breathless and stunned, I wander the trove, struggling to walk within the muck that fills the space between treasure piles.
From "Challenger Deep" by Neal Shusterman
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
When it gets grittier, the handheld camera comes in, as Pine mucks about in the mud and literally goes underground to find the truth.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 30, 2022
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
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 Johnson, Samuel W. (Samuel William)
In a day of action at Syston Brook, volunteers mucked in to shovel "absolutely solid" silt out of the concrete-bottomed channel, which was then removed by the Environment Agency.
From BBC ● Aug. 3, 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
Even if significant debris flows don’t happen, roads could be mucked with mud, “and there will probably be a lot of road closures in and around those burn scars,” Kittell said.
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 11, 2025
“The assumption is that the new tissue, whatever you put in there, is going to heal slower because the environment has already been kind of mucked around with,” Altchek said.
From Seattle Times ● Sep. 2, 2023
He looked down to check his watch, but it was as mucked up as the rest of him.
From "Out of Darkness" by Ashley Hope Pérez
Proponents like Liverpool owner John Henry wound up apologizing for mucking with the product.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 31, 2026
"There are consequences, we are not mucking around now," he said.
From BBC ● Sep. 9, 2025
Burns said she always liked matching taller players against shorter players and the inverse, mucking up the opposing team’s vision on the court to force turnovers.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 19, 2025
And that means finding a problem, guessing how it can be answered or solved, and then mucking around.
From Salon ● Dec. 28, 2024
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
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.
