mush
/mʌʃ/ noun, verb, interjection, proper noun
Forms mushes mushing mushed moosh Muş
- noun A somewhat liquid mess, often of food; a soft or semisolid substance.
- noun (radio) A mixture of noise produced by the harmonics of continuous-wave stations.
- noun (surfing) The foam of a breaker.
- noun (geology) A magmatic body containing a significant proportion of crystals suspended in the liquid phase or melt.
- noun (MLE) A gun. “Do you want me to back out the mush, bruv?”
- verb To squish so as to break into smaller pieces or to combine with something else. “He mushed the ingredients together.”
- noun A food comprising cracked or rolled grains cooked in water or milk; porridge.
- noun (rustic US) Cornmeal cooked in water and served as a porridge or as a thick sidedish like grits or mashed potatoes.
- interjection A directive given (usually to dogs or a horse) to start moving, or to move faster.
- noun A walk, especially across the snow with dogs.
- verb (intransitive) To walk, especially across the snow with dogs.
- verb (transitive) To drive dogs, usually pulling a sled, across the snow.
- noun (Quebec, slang) A magic mushroom.
- noun (UK, slang, chiefly Southern England) (US, slang, chiefly Nonantum) A form of address, normally to a man. “Oy mush, come over here and gimme a hand with the motor.”
- noun (UK, slang, chiefly Northern England, Australia) The face.
- noun (chiefly London, slang) A cab driver who is the owner of their cab, and sometimes a small number of other cabs as well; a musher.
- verb (transitive) To notch, cut, or indent (cloth, etc.) with a stamp.
- proper noun A historically Armenian city in the Turuberan province of Greater Armenia, now in eastern Turkey.
- proper noun A province of Turkey.
- noun A form of multi-user dungeon, often used for online social intercourse and role-playing games.
Synonyms
shroom mate pal mug pulp cornmeal mush treacle slop glop dogsled
Etymology
Probably a variant of mash, or from a dialectal variant of Middle English mos (“mush, pulp, porridge”); compare Middle English appelmos (“applesauce”), from Old English mōs (“food, victuals, porridge, mush”), from Proto-West Germanic *mōs, from Proto-Germanic *mōsą (“porridge, food”), from Proto-Indo-European *meh₂d- (“wet, fat, dripping”).
Cognate with Scots moosh (“mush”), Dutch moes (“pulp, mush, porridge”), German Mus (“jam, puree, mush”), Swedish mos (“pulp, mash, mush”).
From Old High German muos and Goidelic mus (“a pap”) or muss (“a porridge”), or any thick preparation of fruit.
Believed to be a contraction of mush on, from Michif, in turn a corruption of French marche (“march”) or marchons!, the cry of voyageurs and coureurs de bois to their dogs. Marche and marchons are respectively the second-person singular and first-person plural imperative forms of marcher (“to move; to travel; to walk”), from Middle French marcher, from Old French marchier, from Frankish *markōn, ultimately from Proto-Germanic *markōną (“to mark; to notice”).
Simple contraction of mushroom.
Webster’s 1913
- noun Meal (esp. Indian meal) boiled in water; hasty pudding; supawn.
- verb To notch, cut, or indent, as cloth, with a stamp.
Etymology [Cf. Gael. mus, muss, pap, porridge, any thick preparation of fruit, OHG. muos; akin to AS. & OS. mos food, and prob, to E. meat. See Meat.]
Etymology [Cf. F. moucheter to cut with small cuts.]
Sources: Wiktionary · WordNet 3.0 · Webster’s 1913 — from the Wiktionary entry “mush”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details