Other forms: muted, mutes, muting
Mute is the button that kills the sound. You mute the TV when the phone rings, mute yourself on a call before you cough, mute the group chat that will not stop buzzing.
As an adjective, mute means silent: he sat mute through the whole meeting. Used of a person who cannot speak, the word is old and now offensive — say non-speaking instead. Online, muting someone hides their posts from you while they carry on posting, which is why people mute rather than block. A mute is also the plug a trumpeter pushes into the bell to soften the tone, and muted describes anything softened that way: muted colours, a muted response. One warning worth having — the fixed phrase is a MOOT point, not a mute one.
1verbmuteTo turn the sound off.~2%
“He muted the television during the adverts.”
2verbhideTo hide someone's posts or messages without them knowing.~2%
“I muted the account rather than argue with it.”
3verbcolourTo make a sound or a colour softer.~18%
“Thick curtains muted the noise from the street.”
4adjectivesilentSilent; making no sound.~61%
“He stayed mute for the whole interview.”
synonyms: silent, speechless
5noundeviceA device pushed into a brass instrument to soften its sound.~17%
“She played the solo with a mute in the trumpet.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 12 sentences found in the wild and placed 11 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Mute arrived from Anglo-Norman and Middle French muet, built from a small word mu, 'dumb, mute', with the ending -et on it. English later reshaped the spelling to match Latin mūtus. That Latin makeover is why we write mute and not muet.
Latin
mūtus
Middle French
muet
Anglo-Norman
muet
Middle English
muet
English, today
mute
Built from
From Middle English muet, from Anglo-Norman muet, moet, Middle French muet, from mu (“dumb, mute”) + -et, remodelled after Latin mūtus.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA