muck
/mʌk
/- I have lived like we did in the jungles, in dirt and filth and muck, unwashed and unkempt.
- Apart from the litter have you also noticed the amount of muck and dirt on the roads this winter?
- The bomb craters were so deep we couldn't walk down into them, so we struggled around their rims like ants, fighting for a purchase in dirt, muck and shattered roots.
Synonyms
- One of Britain's top trainers, Tim Easterby, who has 120 horses at Great Habton, Malton, uses the pure muck as a fertiliser on his own fields.
- I assume the ‘very’ brown boots refers to farmyard muck?
- ‘As I started to turn round a guy tipped a bucket of farmyard muck over me and then threw the rest of it over me and the car,’ he said.
Synonyms
- First we read the menu: there's nowt but foreign muck,
- He seems to have a genuine hatred for and problem with the muck so many kids get raised on, and recognises that this may be the only hot meal they get that day.
- This news has almost forced me to once again swim into the muck of Democratic Underground, which I have not read in almost two weeks.
- He'd asked me to muck a few horses out and I decided to take a radio down to keep myself entertained.
- Straw bedding is fine as long as it is mucked out daily, removing all wet material and keeping the bedding as clean as possible at all times.
- When I go home to my parents in Pennsylvania, people are amazed to see me in the barn, all filthy, mucking stalls out in wellies.
- Help muck the fields and move hay.
- With the horses we mucked the fields and then went out in the morning to feed everyone.
Phrases
as common as muck
make a muck of
where there's muck there's brass
Phrasal verbs
muck about/around
muck about/around with
muck someone about/around
muck in
muck up
muck something up
Origin
Middle English muk, probably of Scandinavian origin: compare with Old Norse myki 'dung', from a Germanic base meaning 'soft', shared by meek.
English muck is from an early Scandinavian word that goes back to a ancient root meaning ‘slippery, slimy’ from which mucus (mid 17th century) also descends. The verb first meant ‘to clean muck from’ and ‘to spread manure’, from which we get muck up or make a mess of and muck around, ‘to behave in a silly or aimless way’. Down-to-earth northerners might often comment that where there's muck there's brass. This form of the proverb, using brass in the sense ‘money’, is recorded in print only from the 1960s, but an earlier version was where there's muck there's money. The Australians introduced Lady Muck and Lord Muck at the beginning of the 20th century as names for a socially pretentious woman or man. The first muckraking was done by poor people, who would collect manure from the filthy streets of the city in the hope of selling it or finding something valuable. Since the start of the 20th century it has been used for searching out and publicizing scandal about people. Mucker or ‘friend’ was originally military slang, first recorded in the 1940s. It probably comes from the idea of a friend being a person who ‘mucks in’ or shares tasks cheerfully.