Word.ws English Dictionary

mud on one's boots

mud on one's boots noun: practical experience.

Noun

mud on one's boots (uncountable)

  1. (figuratively) Practical experience.
    • The civil engineer, for all his skills, is still often known as the man with mud on his boots.1966, Teaching Engineering Design: Proceedings of the Conference on the Teaching of Engineering Design held at Scarborough between 13 and April 1966
    • I used to place architects on a higher level, well above someone like me who works with his hands and gets mud on his boots.2001, Stephen S. Saucerman, Moving to Commercial Construction, page 96

Origin of mud on one's boots

An allusion to various lines of work where a person is physically present on site, e.g. construction as opposed to architectural design.

Questions about mud on one's boots

What does mud on one's boots mean?
Mud on one's boots means practical experience.
What part of speech is mud on one's boots?
Mud on one's boots is a noun.

Words near mud on one's boots in the dictionary

  1. mud map
  2. mud maps
  3. mud minnow
  4. mud monkey
  5. mud monkeys
  6. mud on one's boots
  7. mud out
  8. mud pie
  9. mud pie argument
  10. Mud Pie Island
  11. mud pies

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mud on one's boots (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.

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