Other forms: mumbles, mumbling, mumbled
To mumble is to talk with your mouth barely open, so the words come out soft, run together, and reach nobody. The teenager mumbling an answer into his collar, the shop assistant mumbling a total you have to ask for twice.
You mumble when you are shy, half asleep, embarrassed, or eating — the mouth is not doing its share of the work. It is a noun as well: his thanks came out as a mumble. Keep it apart from mutter, which is close but not the same, because muttering is what annoyance sounds like and wants to be half heard, while mumbling is only unclear. There is no anger in the word at all: stop mumbling is what a teacher says from the back of a room. You mumble something, mumble an apology, mumble to yourself.
1verbmumbleTo speak so quietly and unclearly that the words blur together.
“He mumbled his name and looked at the floor.”
2nounlowA low, unclear way of speaking.
“His thanks came out as a mumble.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
mumble is a way of speaking.
Also accepted in games: mutter
MUM-ble → a MUMMY
A mummy stands in the museum case with cloth wound tight across its mouth. It leans forward to tell you the way to the door, and all that reaches you is a soft blur of sound.
hooks ontomummy
Middle English had momelen, built on mum — the word for saying nothing at all, which survives in keep mum. Mumbling is what happens when mum is not quite complete. German and Dutch made themselves the same word, mümmeln and mommelen, and a Norwegian cousin, mumpa, means to chew with no teeth.
Middle English
momelen
English, today
mumble
Built from
From Middle English momelen, a frequentative of mum#Etymology 3 (“silent”). Compare German mümmeln, Middle Dutch mommelen and Dutch mompelen. Perhaps related to Norwegian Nynorsk mumpa (“to gum, to chew without teeth”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA