From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishmuckmuck1 /mʌk/ noun [uncountable] informal 1 DIRTYdirt, mud, or another sticky substance that makes something dirty Come on, let’s wipe that muck off your face.2 British EnglishTADLG waste matter from animals, sometimes put on land to make plants grow better SYN manure special machinery for spreading muck onto the fields dog muck3 BAD British English something that is unpleasant or of very bad quality How can you eat that muck? It looks disgusting. I’m not surprised she left. He treated her like muck (=very badly).4 → make a muck of something5 → as common as muck
Examples from the Corpus
muck• What else is there to say about muck, glorious muck?• Soft as muck! - Half of them have quit already. - Because he only wants the land, see.• His hands and fingernails were filthy, his face and legs covered in muck.• But investigators believe the still-lost cockpit recorder either lost its pinger or it has been silenced by being socked in muck.• Is muck disposed of on a heap at the bottom of a field, or on to a muck trailer in the yard?• Clean out the leaves and other muck from your house gutters.• You'd get your good barley and the muck would go behind the screens.• I'll just clean the muck off the windscreen and wing mirrors.• Eventually some one will emerge from the muck, the rusty mayoral crown askew on a weary head.• Their suggestions and alternatives might just drag your writing deep into the muck of tired language.• He sometimes gets his shoes soiled in trying to stay out of the muck.muckmuck2 verb → muck about/around → muck in → muck something ↔ out → muck something ↔ up→ See Verb tableExamples from the Corpus
muck• And, as any football-mad kid knows, there is nothing as embarrassing as mucking about in last season's kit.• To McDonough, a stubby 280-pounder, the charm of elective office was not mucking about with papers and figures.• You can come up and let yourself go - shout about and that and muck about.• How long will it take if we all muck in?• And the old caretaker lives next door, so he feeds them and mucks out.• Each does his own mucking out.• Her house, she says, is being renovated and it's mucking up her schedule.• He was taking no chances on having too many deaths to muck up his statistics.Origin muck1 (1200-1300) Probably from a Scandinavian language 