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
But as Cara Giaimo writes for Slate, algae enthusiasts are finding tremendous joy in all the muck.
From Slate ● Jun. 29, 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
There we discovered pitcher-plant bogs where we’d hike up our dresses, sink on our knees in the rich black muck, and stare carnivory right in the lips, feeding spiders to the pitcher plants.
From "The Poisonwood Bible" by Barbara Kingsolver
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
He picks up a hose and washes down his horse, mucks his own stall, spreads fresh bedding, while the rest of his team, his wife, walks their 2-year-old filly around the shedrow.
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 4, 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
Our Colonel's white an' twitterly—'e gets no sleep nor food, But mucks about in 'orspital where nothing does no good.
From Barrack Room Ballads by Kipling, Rudyard
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
Beyond the $500 buy-in, entry into the stacked poker den has become its own kind of currency, where talk of bad beats and mucked hands replaces the usual industry chatter.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 1, 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
Matty Beniers and Jaden Schwartz mucked the puck out of a cluster of bodies along the boards and Beniers tapped it to Dunn, who extended his league-best, personal-best and franchise-best point streak to 12 games.
From Seattle Times ● Mar. 18, 2023
Down here, in the temple’s literal bowels, there was no faint smell of ink and parchment, only the clashing smells of old wood, sweet hay, and mucked dung.
From "Beasts of Prey" by Ayana Gray
"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
And that means finding a problem, guessing how it can be answered or solved, and then mucking around.
From Salon ● Dec. 28, 2024
The city connected the group with damaged homes that were in need of mucking out.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 7, 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.
