mush
/mʌʃ//mʊʃ/
mush noun: a somewhat liquid mess, often of food; a soft or semisolid substance.
Noun (1)
mush (countable and uncountable, plural mushes)
- 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.1855, Frederick Douglass, chapter 1, in My Bondage and My Freedom. […], New York; Auburn, N.Y.: Miller, Orton & Mulligan […], →OCLC
- A mixture of noise produced by the harmonics of continuous-wave stations.
- 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.2008, Bucky McMahon, Night Diver, page 80
- A magmatic body containing a significant proportion of crystals suspended in the liquid phase or melt.
- A gun.
- Do you want me to back out the mush, bruv?
Verb (1)
mush (third-person singular simple present mushes, present participle mushing, simple past and past participle mushed)
- 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.1981 August 15, Loraine Obler, “Sleeping Beauty Recast”, in Gay Community News, volume 9, number 5, page 17
Noun (2)
mush (countable and uncountable, plural mushes)
- A food comprising cracked or rolled grains cooked in water or milk; porridge.
- 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.2007, Andrew F. Smith, The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink
Interjection
- A directive given (usually to dogs or a horse) to start moving, or to move faster.
- "An' of course the dogs can hike along all day with that contraption behind them," affirmed a second of the men. / "Certainly," said Hal, with freezing politeness, taking hold of the gee-pole with one hand and swinging his whip from the other. "Mush!" he shouted. "Mush on there!" / The dogs sprang...1903 July, Jack London, “The Toil of Trace and Trail”, in The Call of the Wild, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., →OCLC, pages 130–131
Noun (3)
mush (plural mushes)
- 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.2026 January 14, Ben Makuch, “White House post nods to racist, far-right subculture, extremism expert says”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 15 Jan 2026
Verb (2)
mush (third-person singular simple present mushes, present participle mushing, simple past and past participle mushed)
- To walk, especially across the snow with dogs.
- [skiing] It's as beautiful as you always described it, Sam. / I think we'd make better time on the dog sled. You in the mood to mush?2019, Bob Smiley, “Cocaine Pills and Pony Meat” (17:50 from the start), in Victor Nelli Jr., director, Atypical, season 3, episode 3, spoken by Julia and Sam (Amy Okuda and Keir Gilchrist), via...
- 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.1910, Jack London, Burning Daylight, part 1 chapter 4
Noun (4)
mush (plural mushes)
- A magic mushroom.
- Synonyms:
- shroom
Noun (5)
mush (plural mushes)
- (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.2018, Brenda Spalding, Bottle Alley, Heritage Publishing, →ISBN, chapter 1
- The face.
- Synonyms:
- mug
Noun (6)
mush (plural mushes)
Verb (3)
mush (third-person singular simple present mushes, present participle mushing, simple past and past participle mushed)
Proper noun capitalized: Mush
Mush
- A historically Armenian city in the Turuberan province of Greater Armenia, now in eastern Turkey.
- A province of Turkey.
Noun (7) capitalized: MUSH
MUSH (plural MUSHes)
- A form of multi-user dungeon, often used for online social intercourse and role-playing games.
mush meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi and Urdu
mush in Hindi
- मुश
mush in Tamil
- மசு
mush in Marathi
- मुश
mush in Urdu
- دلیہ, نرم گودا, پیدل سفر کرنا
More languagesFewer languages
- mush in Bengali
- নরম মণ্ড, জাউ, অত্যধিক আবেগপ্রবণতা
- mush in Telugu
- ముష్
- mush in Malayalam
- ഇങ്ക്, കഞ്ഞി, കുറുക്ക്, കുറുക്കിയത്
- mush in Kannada
- ತಿರುಳು, ಜೋಳದ ಅಂಬಲಿ, ಗಂಜಿ
- mush in Gujarati
- મુશ
- mush in Odia
- ମୁଶ୍
Examples of mush in a sentence
- My baby's food needs to be mushed up before she can eat it.
- "Mush!" he yelled at the dogs pulling the sled.
- In the face of velocitized steel, even the strongest among us are mush.
Synonyms of mush
Forms of mush
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | mushes |
| alternative form | moosh |
| plural | MUSHes |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | mushes |
| present participle | mushing |
| past participle | mushed |
| past | mushed |
Origin of mush
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”).
From Old High German muos and Goidelic mus (“a pap”) or muss (“a porridge”), or any thick preparation of fruit.
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”).
Words formed from mush
Words that rhyme with mush
Questions about mush
- What does mush mean?
- Mush means a somewhat liquid mess, often of food; a soft or semisolid substance.
- What is mush in Hindi?
- Mush in Hindi is मुश. See Mush meaning in Hindi.
- What part of speech is mush?
- Mush can be a noun, a verb, an interjection or a proper noun.
- How do you pronounce mush?
- Mush is pronounced /mʌʃ/ (UK).
- What is the plural of mush?
- The plural of mush is mushes.
Words near mush in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: mush (page history and authors); Mush (page history and authors); MUSH (page history and authors); mush (Hindi, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); mush (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); mush (Marathi, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); mush (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); mush (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors); mush (Telugu, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); mush (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license); mush (Kannada Wiktionary) (page history and authors); mush (Gujarati, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); mush (Odia, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license). 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: en-us-mush.ogg, en-us-mush.ogg, en-au-mush.ogg.
Cite this entry: “mush.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/mush. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
