Clutter vs Muddle - What's the difference?
clutter | muddle |
A confused disordered jumble of things.
* L'Estrange
*{{quote-magazine, year=2013, month=May-June, author=
, title= (obsolete) Clatter; confused noise.
Background echos, from clouds etc., on a radar or sonar screen.
(countable) A group of cats;
* 2008 , John Robert Colombo, The Big Book of Canadian Ghost Stories , Introduction
To fill something with .
*{{quote-magazine, title=No hiding place
, date=2013-05-25, volume=407, issue=8837, page=74, magazine=(The Economist)
(obsolete) To clot or coagulate, like blood.
To make a confused noise; to bustle.
* Tennyson
To mix together, to mix up; to confuse.
To mash slightly for use in a cocktail.
To dabble in mud.
To make turbid or muddy.
* L'Estrange
To think and act in a confused, aimless way.
To cloud or stupefy; to render stupid with liquor; to intoxicate partially.
* Bentley
* Arbuthnot
To waste or misuse, as one does who is stupid or intoxicated.
* Hazlitt
A mixture; a confusion; a garble.
As nouns the difference between clutter and muddle
is that clutter is a confused disordered jumble of things while muddle is a mixture; a confusion; a garble.As verbs the difference between clutter and muddle
is that clutter is to fill something with while muddle is to mix together, to mix up; to confuse.clutter
English
Noun
(-)- He saw what a clutter there was with huge, overgrown pots, pans, and spits.
William E. Conner
An Acoustic Arms Race, volume=101, issue=3, page=206-7, magazine=(American Scientist) , passage=Nonetheless, some insect prey take advantage of clutter' by hiding in it. Earless ghost swift moths become “invisible” to echolocating bats by forming mating clusters close (less than half a meter) above vegetation and effectively blending into the ' clutter of echoes that the bat receives from the leaves and stems around them.}}
- (Jonathan Swift)
- Organizing ghost stories is like herding a clutter of cats: the phenomenon resists organization and classification.
Derived terms
* surface clutter * volume clutterVerb
(en verb)citation, passage=In America alone, people spent $170 billion on “direct marketing”—junk mail of both the physical and electronic varieties—last year. Yet of those who received unsolicited adverts through the post, only 3% bought anything as a result. If the bumf arrived electronically, the take-up rate was 0.1%. And for online adverts the “conversion” into sales was a minuscule 0.01%. That means about $165 billion was spent not on drumming up business, but on annoying people, creating landfill and cluttering spam filters.}}
- (Holland)
- It [the goose] cluttered here, it chuckled there.
muddle
English
Verb
(muddl)- Young children tend to muddle their words.
- He muddled the mint sprigs in the bottom of the glass.
- (Jonathan Swift)
- He did ill to muddle the water.
- Their old master Epicurus seems to have had his brains so muddled and confounded with them, that he scarce ever kept in the right way.
- often drunk, always muddled
- They muddle it [money] away without method or object, and without having anything to show for it.
Derived terms
* muddler (agent noun) * muddle along * muddle through * muddle upNoun
(en noun)- The muddle of nervous speech he uttered did not have much meaning.