mud
Americannoun
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wet, soft earth or earthy matter, as on the ground after rain, at the bottom of a pond, or along the banks of a river; mire.
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Informal. scandalous or malicious assertions or information.
The opposition threw a lot of mud at our candidate.
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Slang. brewed coffee, especially when strong or bitter.
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a mixture of chemicals and other substances pumped into a drilling rig chiefly as a lubricant for the bit and shaft.
verb (used with object)
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to cover, smear, or spatter with mud.
to mud the walls of a hut.
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to stir up the mud or sediment in.
waders mudding the clear water.
verb (used without object)
noun
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a fine-grained soft wet deposit that occurs on the ground after rain, at the bottom of ponds, lakes, etc
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informal slander or defamation
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informal not at all clear
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to disgrace or defame someone
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informal a humorous drinking toast
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informal someone is disgraced
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informal to slander; vilify
verb
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of mud
1300–50; Middle English mudde, mode < Middle Low German mudde. Cf. mother 2
Explanation
Mud is very wet dirt. On rainy days, you might enjoy putting on your tall rubber boots and squishing around in the mud. When you mix soil with water, you get mud — a soft, almost sticky material. Mud results from a damp environment or a recent rain. There's also the mud that masons or bricklayers use to stick stones together — it resembles mud, though it's actually mortar or plaster, and to use it when building is to mud. The word mud also showed up in 1920s as slang" meaning "bad coffee," and if your "name is mud," you've got a bad reputation.
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:
That, and sitting in salt rooms and mud baths or gazing at the bottom of our stand mixer’s bowl.
From Salon ● Jul. 26, 2026
She was underweight with disheveled feathers and feet caked with mud.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 24, 2026
He thinks proven software names with solid earnings should be in every tech portfolio, but added they have yet to “emerge from the mud for the average investor to jump back in.”
From MarketWatch ● Jul. 21, 2026
They lie in mud, shells, ice and rock - fragments of evidence from a time when the Atlantic appears to have changed with startling speed.
From BBC ● Jul. 14, 2026
I screamed like a mountain lion and fell to the ground and rolled, throwing mud and dirt all over, but those pixies bit my nose, my cheeks, my ears, and all ten of my fingers.
From "Rump: The (Fairly) True Story of Rumpelstilskin" by Liesl Shurtliff
“Getting washed away, built over, snowed in, mudded, overgrown.”
From New York Times ● Apr. 20, 2022
Then an L.A. pitcher approached his front office with an observation: The balls that the Astros were using were mudded up differently.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 13, 2021
This time, the Dodgers thought that the Astros had balls mudded up more heavily for their pitchers, and that the batboy would deliver those to the ump during innings when the Dodgers were batting.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 13, 2021
In 2017 MLB did not offer much guidance on how a baseball was supposed to be mudded up, so it was difficult to punish a team for it.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 13, 2021
Old Tallow’s cabin was small, neat, thickly mudded between logs.
From "The Birchbark House" by Louise Erdrich
He explained he would go out at night and change into black clothing to go "mudding" - where his "self-loathing" would cause him to cover himself in mud.
From BBC ● Oct. 27, 2023
They also take part in activities like searching a nearby lake for crappie fish with their bare hands or going mudding with monster trucks.
From Seattle Times ● Jul. 2, 2023
It hits him: “I lost the effort, the hustle, the mudding, and the megaphone. I lost the fun.”
From The Guardian ● Oct. 26, 2020
TimMorgan @ @ @ No. Ms Konigsburg is critisizing the Hobbit and Jackson is mudding the waters for all those who have not read all of Tolkien's work,as I have.
From Time ● Jan. 5, 2013
He had a wife, Nancy, and three children, and his own house, which he had built with his own hands, a small tight adobe that required mudding every two or three autumns.
From "The Milagro Beanfield War" by John Nichols
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.
