Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A moist sticky mixture, especially of mud and filth.
  • noun Moist farmyard dung; manure.
  • noun Dark fertile soil containing decaying vegetable matter.
  • noun Something filthy or disgusting.
  • noun Earth, rocks, or clay excavated in mining.
  • noun The pile of discarded cards, as in poker.
  • intransitive verb To fertilize with manure or compost.
  • intransitive verb To make dirty, especially with muck.
  • intransitive verb To remove muck or dirt from (a mine, for example).
  • intransitive verb To fold (one's hand) in a card game, especially by pushing one's cards away.
  • intransitive verb To muck one's hand in a card game.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To manure.
  • To remove muck or manure from.
  • To labor very hard; toil.
  • noun An erroneous form, due to mistaking the adverb amuck for a noun with the indefinite article. See amuck.
  • noun Dung in a moist state; a mass of dung and putrefied vegetable matter.
  • noun Hence Manure in general.
  • noun A wet, slimy mass; a mess.
  • noun Money: so called in contempt.
  • Resembling muck; mucky; damp.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adverb Abbreviation of Amuck.
  • adverb See Amuck.
  • transitive verb To manure with muck.
  • adjective Like muck; mucky; also, used in collecting or distributing muck.
  • verb To excavate and remove muck{5}. Often used with out, .
  • noun Dung in a moist state; manure.
  • noun Vegetable mold mixed with earth, as found in low, damp places and swamps.
  • noun Anything filthy or vile.
  • noun Money; -- in contempt.
  • noun (Mining) The unwanted material, especially rock or soil, that must be excavated in order to reach the valuable ore; also, the unwanted material after being excavated or crushed by blasting, or after being removed to a waste pile. In the latter sense, also called a muck pile.
  • noun bar iron which has been through the rolls only once.
  • noun crude puddled iron ready for the squeezer or rollers.
  • noun see muck pile in the vocabulary.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Slimy mud.
  • noun Soft or slimy manure.
  • noun dirt; something that makes another thing dirty.
  • verb To shovel muck.
  • verb To manure with muck.
  • verb To do a dirty job.
  • verb poker, colloquial To pass (give one's cards back to the dealer).

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • verb spread manure, as for fertilization
  • noun fecal matter of animals
  • noun any thick, viscous matter
  • verb soil with mud, muck, or mire
  • verb remove muck, clear away muck, as in a mine

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English muk, of Scandinavian origin; akin to Old Norse myki, dung.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle English mok, muk, from Old Norse myki, mykr ("dung") (compare Icelandic mykja), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)meug (“slick, slippery”), *meuk (compare Welsh mign ("swamp"), Latin mūcus ("snot"), mucere ("to be moldy or musty"), Latvian mukls ("swampy"), Ancient Greek mýxa 'mucus, lamp wick', mýkes 'fungus'), from *(s)meug, meuk 'to slip'. More at meek.

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