What it means
Means messing around instead of getting on with what you're meant to be doing. It can be playful, cheeky, a bit childish, or just plain time-wasting. You hear it loads as a mild telling-off from parents, teachers, bosses, or anyone who's watched a simple job drift off into nonsense.
Usage examples
"We were meant to paint the flat, but Gaz started doing keepy-uppies with the roller and now we’re all mucking about, covered in magnolia like legends."
"Stop mucking about and give me a hand with the boxes."
"We spent the whole afternoon just mucking about by the river."
"Quit mucking about with the trolley and help me get the shopping in before the ice cream turns to soup."
"They were meant to be revising, but ended up mucking about with filters and fake posh accents for an hour."
Where it comes from
It comes from muck, a very old English word for dirt, filth, and farm manure. By the 18th and 19th centuries, muck about was already being used for pottering around in a messy or pointless way. From there it naturally slid into today’s sense of fooling around instead of getting on with it.
Other ways to say it
Editors of this term
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