Word.ws English Dictionary

mussing up

mussing up is the present participle and gerund of muss up.

Meaning of muss up

Verb

muss up (third-person singular simple present musses up, present participle mussing up, simple past and past participle mussed up)

  1. (transitive) To thoroughly muss something.
  2. (obsolete, slang) To treat roughly; to beat up.
    • Tuxedo is a good-hearted, gentle, quiet, soft-voiced tobacco[…] no "fighting spirit" in it anywhere to muss up your tongue.1916 March 11, “[advertisement] You Men Who Have Pipes”, in Saturday Evening Post
  3. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see muss, up.

Questions about mussing up

What is mussing up the present participle and gerund of?
Mussing up is the present participle and gerund of muss up.

Words near mussing up in the dictionary

  1. mussies
  2. mussiest
  3. mussily
  4. mussiness
  5. mussing
  6. mussing up
  7. mussitate
  8. mussitated
  9. mussitates
  10. mussitating
  11. mussitation

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mussing up (page history and authors); muss up (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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Cite this entry: “mussing up.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/mussing_up. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.