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muddle
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
muddle
I.noun
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ VERB
get
▪ Gerald Ford getting into a muddle about what was and wasn't a Warsaw Pact country.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ a legal muddle
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Gerald Ford getting into a muddle about what was and wasn't a Warsaw Pact country.
▪ It is too valuable a document of human heartbreak and muddle to be scorned or dismissed.
▪ Nevertheless, if we allow ourselves to be swayed by every fashion that comes along, we live in a perpetual muddle.
▪ None of the muddle in her room mattered.
▪ Over the years the generations had gotten into a chronological muddle.
▪ She could sense his muddle, and it touched her.
▪ This book assesses the technological fix for the muddle left by downsizing and reengineering.
▪ Unless, of course, there had been a muddle in the names.
II.verb
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADVERB
along
▪ Analytical ability Does the candidate reason his or her way through the question or simply muddle along its surface?
▪ The challenge is overcoming that nagging sense that old ideas are merely being reworked, that sense of muddling along.
▪ Yet it is not clear if the Communist party has an alternative strategy or is just muddling along.
through
▪ They must muddle through in a fog of grumble and contempt.
▪ You muddle through, reduced to selling your own ads to make a decent buck.
▪ While children were very young it was possible to muddle through.
▪ Like so many other students, he had muddled through without having to break a sweat.
▪ When it comes to the detail of everyday life most of us just muddle through somehow, but Dennis was a Platonist.
▪ She just has to muddle through.
▪ My own feeling in 1981 was that we should try to achieve something better and that just muddling through was not enough.
▪ Or I can stay, as I know I probably will. Muddle through.
up
▪ It's too bad of Blondel, he keeps getting them muddled up and out of order.
▪ It is likely that a good many valuable stones were destroyed in this way because Pliny was muddling up hardness and toughness.
■ VERB
get
▪ It's too bad of Blondel, he keeps getting them muddled up and out of order.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ I found them to be muddled, frightened, weary.
▪ Passion starts to muddle my thinking.
▪ Several incidents are clever and revealing, others muddled.
▪ The lines between re-creations and reality are so muddled that some news programs have even used Hollywood films to illustrate news stories.
▪ They muddled around the fringes of true power, never quite brave enough or decisive enough to take the plunge.
▪ While children were very young it was possible to muddle through.
▪ You muddle through, reduced to selling your own ads to make a decent buck.
▪ You can see why it is easy to be muddled about carbohydrate.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Muddle

Muddle \Mud"dle\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Muddled; p. pr. & vb. n. Muddling.] [From Mud.]

  1. To make turbid, or muddy, as water. [Obs.]

    He did ill to muddle the water.
    --L'Estrange.

  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.
    --Bentley.

    Often drunk, always muddled.
    --Arbuthnot.

  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.
    --Hazlitt.

  4. To mix confusedly; to confuse; to make a mess of; as, to muddle matters; also, to perplex; to mystify.
    --F. W. Newman.

Muddle

Muddle \Mud"dle\, v. i.

  1. To dabble in mud. [Obs.]
    --Swift.

  2. To think and act in a confused, aimless way.

Muddle

Muddle \Mud"dle\, n. A state of being turbid or confused; hence, intellectual cloudiness or dullness.

We both grub on in a muddle.
--Dickens.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
muddle

1590s, "destroy the clarity of" (a transferred sense); literal sense ("to bathe in mud") is from c.1600; perhaps frequentative formation from mud, or from Dutch moddelen "to make (water) muddy," from the same Proto-Germanic source. Sense of "to make muddy" is from 1670s; that of "make confused" first recorded 1680s. Meaning "to bungle" is from 1885. Related: Muddled; muddling.

muddle

1818, from muddle (v.).

Wiktionary
muddle

n. A mixture; a confusion; a garble. vb. 1 To mix together, to mix up; to confuse. 2 To mash slightly for use in a cocktail. 3 To dabble in mud. 4 To make turbid or muddy. 5 To think and act in a confused, aimless way. 6 To cloud or stupefy; to render stupid with liquor; to intoxicate partially. 7 To waste or misuse, as one does who is stupid or intoxicated.

Related phrases:
WordNet
muddle

  1. n. a confused multitude of things [syn: clutter, jumble, mare's nest, welter, smother]

  2. informal terms for a difficult situation; "he got into a terrible fix"; "he made a muddle of his marriage" [syn: fix, hole, jam, mess, pickle, kettle of fish]

  3. v. make into a puddle; "puddled mire" [syn: puddle]

  4. mix up or confuse; "He muddled the issues" [syn: addle, puddle]

Wikipedia
Muddle

Muddle may refer to:

  • Mr. Muddle, one of the Mr. Men from the children's book series by Richard Hargreaves
  • MDL (programming language), the Lisp-derived language that Zork was first written in
  • MUDDL, a programming language originally created for the first Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw
  • Mudlle, a programming language originally created for the MUD MUME by David Gay and Gustav Hållberg
  • Muddle (Kent cricketer)
Muddle (Kent cricketer)

Muddle (first name and dates unknown) was an English cricketer who played in first-class cricket matches for Kent in 1768.

Related phrases:

Usage examples of "muddle".

I frowned at this, and then at his depiction, trying to convince myself that I was muddled, addled, mistaken, in the throes of a concussion, just plain crazy.

I took to mean some obscure mystical interpretation he had formulated in his own muddled, ageing brain.

I thought of those two nations which seemed to me now, from my elevated perspective, in a state of aimless economic and moral muddle.

Our feelings about bilingualism and multilingualism are a dense thicket of muddles and contradictions.

Nestled in a nutlike shell no larger than a human fist, the organ was a tangle of axons and dendrons webbing together a gelatinous muddle of neuron clusters.

I have tried to keep a sharp vigil against the muddling results of an essentialist sexuality.

Didst think I was so lustsome for you that my brain was too muddled to understand all the implications of what you offer?

Upon which muddled speech she tucked him in with a brisk motherliness and started off down the ward.

Mother would have squelched such talk, and Daddy muddled them with long words, while Jane Anne would have looked puzzled to the point of tears.

Finances were getting muddled, too, and he realised how small his capital actually was when the needs of others made claims upon it.

Their muddled life defied disentanglement, their difficulties were inextricable.

I will stop this muddled nonsense about closing my eyes once and for all.

This muddled my plans and caused me a great deal of needless irritation.

On any other such night Theo would have let it go, but he was stone sober, having drunk nothing but goblin tea, and it was either that or think about his own still very muddled plans.

If the centre of our life is a certain fact, would not people far from the centre have a muddled version of that fact?