Other forms: muttering, mutters, muttered
To mutter is to speak with your mouth barely open, low and unclear, so the person beside you catches maybe half of it. A man muttering at the bus stop, a colleague muttering as she reads the email, you muttering the door code to yourself.
Most muttering is complaint. It is what people do instead of saying the thing out loud — muttering about the boss, muttering darkly about the price of the tickets. It covers talking to yourself as well, and reading something under your breath. You mutter something, you mutter to yourself, and you mutter about whatever you dislike. The noun muttering is the usual word for discontent that has not yet become a row: there was muttering in the ranks.
1verbmumbleTo speak low and unclearly, so that people catch only half of it.~68%
“He muttered something and walked off.”
2verbmutterTo complain quietly, to yourself or to whoever is next to you.~30%
“They were muttering about the new rules all afternoon.”
synonyms: grumble
3nounvoicesA low unclear sound of voices; quiet discontent.~2%
“There was a mutter of disagreement at the back of the room.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 81 sentences found in the wild and placed 39 of them on a sense (42 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
MUTT-er → a MOTOR
An old motor runs under the window all night, low and flat, on and on. Put your ear to the glass and you can just hear it complaining about you — word after word, and every one of them too low to catch.
hooks ontomotor
Mutter is the noise it names. Middle English muteren was built to sound like the thing itself, and half of Europe made the same word out of the same mouth-noise — German muttern, to mutter or whisper, Old Norse muðla, to murmur, Latin muttīre. Say any of them quietly and you can hear where they came from.
Middle English
muteren
English, today
mutter
From Middle English muteren, moteren, of imitative of the sound origin. Compare Low German mustern, musseln (“to whisper”), German muttern (“to mutter; whisper”), Old Norse muðla (“to murmur”). Compare also Latin muttīre, mutīre.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA