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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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
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have been muckingperfect progressive
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has been muckingperfect progressive
Past
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muckedsimple
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had muckedperfect
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was muckingprogressive
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were muckingprogressive
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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
A woman, in a rhinestone shirt, told me that she wanted to convene her fellow cyclists to whizz by the gulleys and alleyways around Tucson, searching for clues in the muck.
From Slate ● Feb. 23, 2026
Even “when I’m in the mud and I have filled up my muck boots with mud and water, at no point have I ever thought, ‘Man I miss the office,’” he says.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 7, 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
And then, as the birds continued their bombardment, the robot turned and blindly trudged back through the muck.
From "The Wild Robot" by Peter Brown
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
Whether one mucks in for the full ride or just appreciates the concept, duration is part of the art.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 5, 2024
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
The same may be said of the combined water in the clay that is mixed with some mucks, which is only expelled at a high temperature.
From Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel by Johnson, Samuel W. (Samuel William)
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
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
There's a sense he has mucked up and defending him is difficult.
From BBC ● Jan. 24, 2023
But weirdo me, I was bom with too much grease inside my skull, and it got all thick and muddy and disgusting, and it only mucked up the works.
From "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian" by Sherman Alexie
"I liked her because if you asked her a question, you'd get an answer - no mucking about."
From BBC ● Jul. 11, 2026
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
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 craft cider makers often welcome volunteers who enjoy mucking in and spending time outdoors with their families.
From Salon ● Jul. 30, 2024
I've learned not to take too deep a whijf when mucking out the barn, but most of the smells are good, wonderful, and hopeful, if smells can be such a thing.
From "Hattie Big Sky" by Kirby Larson
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.
