Mucky means covered in dirt or mud. Mucky boots, a mucky job, get mucky.
It is homely and northern in flavour, and it is affectionate where filthy is not — children get mucky. It also means indecent, as in a mucky book, and there it is comic rather than shocking. Note muck, which farmers use of manure.
1adjectivemuckyCovered in dirt or mud.
“Take off those mucky boots before you come into the kitchen!”
mucky is a quality of dirtiness.
Middle English
muk
English
muck
English, today
mucky
Built from
From muck + -y. muck comes from Middle English muk. From Middle English mok, muk, from Old Norse myki, mykr (“dung”) or less likely Old English moc, moce (in hlōsmoc (“pigsty dung”) and lustmoce (“lady's smock (Cardamine pratensis)”)) (compare Icelandic mykja and Danish møg ("dung")), from Proto-Germanic mukį̄ (“dung; manure”), from Proto-Germanic muk-, from Proto-Indo-European (s)mewg-, mewk- (“slick, slippery”) (compare Welsh mign (“swamp”), Latin mūcus (“snot”), mucere (“to be moldy or musty”), Latvian mukls (“swampy”), Albanian myk (“mould”), Ancient Greek μύξα (“mucus, lamp wick”), Ancient Greek μύκης (“mushroom”), German Mauke (“mud fever”)), from *(s)mewg, mewk 'to slip'. More at meek.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA