MUDDLE • DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • Definition of Muddle

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/mˈədəl/ Listen

noun

Muddle n. A state of being turbid or confused; hence, intellectual cloudiness or dullness. "We both grub on in a muddle."

verb

Muddle v. t. (past & past part. muddled; pres. part. muddling)

1.

To make turbid, or muddy, as water. (Obs.) "He did ill to muddle the water."

2.

To cloud or stupefy; to render stupid with liquor; to intoxicate partially. "Epicurus seems to have had brains so muddled and confounded, that he scarce ever kept in the right way." "Often drunk, always muddled."

3.

To waste or misuse, as one does who is stupid or intoxicated. (R.) "They muddle it (money) away without method or object, and without having anything to show for it."

4.

To mix confusedly; to confuse; to make a mess of; as, to muddle matters; also, to perplex; to mystify.

Muddle v. i.

1.

To dabble in mud. (Obs.)

2.

To think and act in a confused, aimless way.

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Etymology of 'Muddle'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Muddle" Quotes from Famous Books

... who may turn out their superior. Whether they know it, or not, their aversion to the authorship of women is very much like the conviction of a weak pedestrian, that women are not naturally fitted to take long walks; or the opinion of a man whose own accounts are in a muddle, that his wife is constitutionally unfitted to ...

— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... go on digging and knowing all the time as them lads is breaking their necks over the cliff side. Never was in such a muddle as this before. Why didn't they say what they ...

— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn

... card appeared at the head of the column, and was supplemented by a complete resume of the Blithers-Graustark muddle: ...

— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... hands. There were yards of them, rods of them, miles of them—they belonged to a six or sixteen horse set. I do not know which. I sat on them. They writhed in my lap, wrapped around my feet, and around the gun against my knee, in a hopeless and dangerous muddle. Of course the reins were twisted. I did not know one from the other. I gave a desperate jerk which sent the leaders plunging to the right, where fortunately they brought up against the rock wall. Had they gone the ...

— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson

... affinity by marriage, familiarity, knowledge of words and ways, sweethearting and trafficking, so that they know the children of the Rom as the house-world does not know them, and they in some sort belong together. It is a muddle, perhaps, and a puzzle; I doubt if anybody quite understands it. No novelist, no writer whatever, has as yet clearly explained the curious fact that our entire nomadic population, excepting tramps, is not, as we thought in our childhood, composed of English people ...

— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland

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