muckrake
muckrake noun: a rake for scraping up dung.
Noun
muckrake (plural muckrakes)
Verb
muckrake (third-person singular simple present muckrakes, present participle muckraking, simple past and past participle muckraked)
- To search for and expose corruption or scandal, especially as a form of investigative journalism.
- To think that he cares about nothing save the possibility of being found out and made ridiculous! All his friends have been ‘muckraked,’ as he calls it, and he has sat aloft and smiled over their plight; he was the landed gentleman, the true aristrocrat, whom the worries of traders and...1914, Upton Sinclair, Sylvia's Marriage
- His book, published this month, combines the muckraking approach of Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation” with the wry travelogue approach of a Michael Moore movie.2020 September 24, Alex Williams, “The Ugly (and Glorious) Truth About American Supermarkets”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 07 Oct 2020
Forms of muckrake
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | muckrakes |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | muckrakes |
| present participle | muckraking |
| past participle | muckraked |
| past | muckraked |
Origin of muckrake
From muck + rake.
Questions about muckrake
- What does muckrake mean?
- Muckrake means a rake for scraping up dung.
- What part of speech is muckrake?
- Muckrake can be a noun or a verb.
- What is the plural of muckrake?
- The plural of muckrake is muckrakes.
Words near muckrake in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: muckrake (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:
Cite this entry: “muckrake.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/muckrake. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.