Muddies

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Causes water or another liquid to become thick and dirty with mud or similar particles ; complicates or obscures a situation or meaning, making it harder to understand
2. Turns a clear or clean liquid into a murky, muddy state ; renders facts or circumstances confusing by mixing or obscuring information
3. Adds mud or dirt to a liquid, making it less transparent ; obscures clarity by creating confusion or ambiguity in an issue or explanation

Etymology: "Muddies" is the third-person singular present of "muddy," used as a verb. The verb is simply the adjective pressed into service: someone muddies a stream by stirring up its bottom, or muddies an argument by introducing irrelevant points. The adjective itself came from "mud" plus the suffix "-y," meaning "having the quality of," so to muddy something is to make it take on that quality. The noun "mud" has a murky ancestry. It may have been borrowed from Middle Dutch "modde" or Middle Low German "modde," which trace back to a Proto-Germanic root for mud, possibly connected to an Indo-European word meaning "moist." Its doublet is "muddle," a word that entered English from the same source but took a different path, so the two words are close relatives that ended up with different meanings.

Synonyms: dirties, soils

Antonyms: cleans