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mush

nounverbnouninterjectionnounverbnounnounnounverbattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//mʌʃ//
  • United Kingdom//mʊʃ//
  • Canada//mʌʃ//
  • Ireland//mʊʃ//

A somewhat liquid mess, often of food; a soft or semisolid substance.

noun

  1. 1

    A somewhat liquid mess, often of food; a soft or semisolid substance.

    His food is of the coarsest kind, consisting for the most part of cornmeal mush, which often finds its way from the wooden tray to his mouth in an oyster shell.

  2. 2

    A mixture of noise produced by the harmonics of continuous-wave stations.

  3. 3

    The foam of a breaker.

    And Rincon was all about surfing. Flash back thirty-odd years, to a skinny kid on a Styrofoam belly-board, pin-wheeling out into the mush of Jacksonville Beach, Florida.

  4. 4

    A magmatic body containing a significant proportion of crystals suspended in the liquid phase or melt.

  5. 5

    A gun.

    Do you want me to back out the mush, bruv?

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”).

verb

  1. 1

    To squish so as to break into smaller pieces or to combine with something else.

    He mushed the ingredients together.

    One must compartmentalize one's life and not let different facets/experiences mush over into one another.

noun

  1. 1

    A food comprising cracked or rolled grains cooked in water or milk; porridge.

  2. 2

    Cornmeal cooked in water and served as a porridge or as a thick sidedish like grits or mashed potatoes.

    However, they did make and sometimes even bake cornmeal mushes that could be either sweetened or fortified with fat.

Etymology

From Old High German muos and Goidelic mus (“a pap”) or muss (“a porridge”), or any thick preparation of fruit.

interjection

  1. 1

    A directive given (usually to dogs or a horse) to start moving, or to move faster.

Etymology

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”).

noun

  1. 1

    A walk, especially across the snow with dogs.

    The White House posted a cartoon to X on Wednesday of two Greenlandic mush teams with three huskies each, pointing towards the choice of the white pillars and the South Lawn or a tempestuous scene by the Great Wall of China and Red Square in Russia.

verb

  1. 1

    To walk, especially across the snow with dogs.

  2. 2

    To drive dogs, usually pulling a sled, across the snow.

    Together the two men loaded and lashed the sled. They warmed their hands for the last time, pulled on their mittens, and mushed the dogs over the bank and down to the river-trail.

noun

  1. 1

    slangA magic mushroom.

Etymology

Simple contraction of mushroom.

noun

  1. 1

    slang(US, slang, chiefly Nonantum) A form of address, normally to a man.

    Oy mush, come over here and gimme a hand with the motor.

    "Hey, Mush!" Tony Pellegrino called to Michael standing on the other side of the street.

  2. 2

    slangThe face.

Etymology

From Angloromani mush (“man”), from Romani mursh, from Sanskrit मनुष्य (manuṣya, “human being, man”).

noun

  1. 1

    slangA cab driver who is the owner of their cab, and sometimes a small number of other cabs as well; a musher.

Etymology

Possibly from mush (“to drive dogs, usually pulling a sled, across snow”, verb), or mush (“(slang, rare) umbrella”, noun) (a clipping of mushroom, from the similar appearance; referring to drivers shielding passengers with umbrellas in rainy weather).

verb

  1. 1

    To notch, cut, or indent (cloth, etc.) with a stamp.

Etymology

Compare French moucheter (“to cut with small cuts”).

Forms

plural
mushes
past tense
mushed
past participle
mushed
present participle
mushing
third person singular
mushes
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).