mump
/mʌmp/
mump verb: to mumble, speak unclearly.
Verb
mump (third-person singular simple present mumps, present participle mumping, simple past and past participle mumped)
- To mumble, speak unclearly.
- Who mump their passion, and who, grimly smiling,
Still thus address the fair with voice beguiling […]1773, Oliver Goldsmith, Epilogue Spoklen by Mrs. Bulkley and Miss Catley [intended for She Stoops to Conquer]
- Who mump their passion, and who, grimly smiling,
- To move the lips with the mouth closed; to mumble, as in sulkiness.
- He mumps, and lowres, and hangs the lip […]1630, John Taylor, The Necessitie of Hanging
- To beg, especially if using a repeated phrase.
- To deprive of (something) by cheating; to impose upon.
- To cheat; to deceive; to play the beggar.
- Your ministerial directors blustered like tragic tyrants here; and then went mumping with a sore leg in America, canting, and whining, and complaining of faction, which represented them as friends to a revenue from the colonies.1774, Edmund Burke, Speech on American Taxation, April 19, 1774
- To be sullen or sulky.
- The Christian also spurns the pinched and mumping sick-room attitude, and the lives of saints are full of a kind of callousness to diseased conditions of body which probably no other human records show.1902, William James, “Lecture 2”, in The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature […] , New York, N.Y.; London: Longmans, Green, and Co. […], →OCLC
- It remained necessary to make a shift at bearing yourself like a man; not mumping, not moping.1948, James Gould Cozzens, Guard of Honor
- To nibble.
Noun
mump (plural mumps)
- A grimace.
Synonyms of mump
1 more synonymsFewer synonyms
Forms of mump
| Verb | |
|---|---|
| third-person singular present | mumps |
| present participle | mumping |
| past participle | mumped |
| past | mumped |
| Noun | |
| plural | mumps |
Origin of mump
Perhaps borrowed through obsolete Dutch mompen (“to cheat, swindle, deceive”), according to Kroonen, a derivative of Proto-Germanic *mump- (“to stain”), perhaps from Proto-Indo-European *mm̥bʰ-neh₂- Also akin to German mimpfeln (“to mumble”), Icelandic mumpa (“to take into the mouth”). See also English mum. While Kroonen claims Ancient Greek μέμφομαι (mémphomai, “I blame, accuse”) and the Germanic forms are reconcilable and related, Beekes rejects this, stating that Germanic -p- cannot here correspond to Greek -φ- and that this etymological connection is not widely considered reliable.
Words formed from mump
Words that rhyme with mump
18 more rhymesFewer rhymes
Questions about mump
- What does mump mean?
- Mump means to mumble, speak unclearly.
- What part of speech is mump?
- Mump can be a verb or a noun.
- How do you pronounce mump?
- Mump is pronounced /mʌmp/.
- What is the past tense of mump?
- The past tense of mump is mumped.
Words near mump in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: mump (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-mump.wav.
Cite this entry: “mump.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/mump. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.