Word.ws English Dictionary

clutter

/ˈklʌtə(ɹ)/US/ˈklʌtɚ/

clutter noun: a confused disordered jumble of things. Also the alternative form of clowder.

Noun

clutter (countable and uncountable, plural clutters)

  1. (uncountable) A confused disordered jumble of things.
    • He saw what a Clutter there was with Huge, Over-grown Pots, Pans, and Spits.1692, Roger L’Estrange, “ (please specify the fable number.) (please specify the name of the fable.)”, in Fables, of Æsop and Other Eminent Mythologists: […], London: […] R[ichard] Sare, […], →OCLC
    • Earless ghost swift moths become “invisible” to echolocating bats by forming mating clusters close (less than half a meter) above vegetation and effectively blending into the clutter of echoes that the bat receives from the leaves and stems around them.2013 May-June, William E. Conner, “An Acoustic Arms Race”, in American Scientist, volume 101, number 3, pages 206–7
  2. (uncountable) Background echoes, from clouds etc., on a radar or sonar screen.
  3. (obsolete) Clatter; confused noise.
    • October 14 1718, John Arbuthnot, letter to Jonathan Swift
      I hardly heard a word of news or politicks, except a little clutter about sending some impertinent presidents du parliament to prison
    • It was then you might have heard a clutter: pots, pans and pitchers, mugs, jugs and jordens, all put themselves in motion at once[…]1835, William Cobbett, John Morgan Cobbett, James Paul Cobbett, Selections from Cobbett's political works, volume 1, page 33
  4. A Sperner family.

Verb

clutter (third-person singular simple present clutters, present participle cluttering, simple past and past participle cluttered)

  1. (transitive) To fill something with clutter.
    • That means about $165 billion was spent not on drumming up business, but on annoying people, creating landfill and cluttering spam filters.2013 May 25, “No hiding place”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8837, page 74
  2. (intransitive, obsolete) To clot or coagulate, like blood.
    • It battereth and cluttereth into knots and balls1601, C[aius] Plinius Secundus [i.e., Pliny the Elder], “[Book XII.]”, in Philemon Holland, transl., The Historie of the World. Commonly Called, The Naturall Historie of C. Plinius Secundus. […]...
  3. (intransitive) To make a confused noise; to bustle.
    • It [the goose] clutter'd here, it chuckled there; / It stirr'd the old wife's mettle: / She shifted in her elbow-chair, / And hurl'd the pan and kettle.1832, Alfred Tennyson, “The Goose”, in Poems. […], volume I, London: Edward Moxon, […], published 1842, →OCLC, stanza VII, page 231
  4. (intransitive, transitive) To utter words hurriedly, especially (but not exclusively) as a speech disorder (compare cluttering).

Proper noun capitalized: Clutter

Clutter (plural Clutters)

  1. A surname.

Also used as

clutter is also the alternative form of clowder.

Examples of clutter in a sentence

  • The desk was cluttered with papers and books, making it hard to concentrate.
  • His latest sculpture is a hodgepodge of kitchen clutter and scrap glued together.
  • She wants to shed the dead weight of so many stacks of old clutter.

All 40 example sentences with clutter

Synonyms of clutter

Forms of clutter

Noun
pluralclutters
Verb
third-person singular presentclutters
present participlecluttering
past participlecluttered
pastcluttered
Proper noun
pluralClutters

Past tense of clutter: cluttered

Plural of clutter: clutters

Origin of clutter

From Middle English cloteren (“to form clots; coagulate; heap on”), from clot (“clot”), equivalent to clot + -er (frequentative suffix). Compare Welsh cludair (“heap, pile”), cludeirio (“to heap”).

Words formed from clutter

Words that rhyme with clutter

5 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about clutter

What does clutter mean?
Clutter means a confused disordered jumble of things.
What part of speech is clutter?
Clutter can be a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce clutter?
Clutter is pronounced /ˈklʌtə(ɹ)/ (UK).
What is the plural of clutter?
The plural of clutter is clutters.

Words near clutter in the dictionary

  1. Clute
  2. Clutha
  3. clutron
  4. clutrons
  5. CLUTs
  6. clutter
  7. clutter up
  8. clutter-free
  9. Clutterbuck
  10. cluttercore
  11. cluttered

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: clutter (page history and authors); Clutter (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-clutter.wav.

Cite this entry: “clutter.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/clutter. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.