Muggle
Part of speech: noun
Morphological type: derivation
Etymology: Etymology tree
English mug
English -le
English Muggle
From mug (“gullible or easily cheated person”) + -le (diminutive suffix), coined by British author J. K. Rowling in her 1997 book Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. She later said in a 2004 interview that the word was made to imply both "foolishness and loveability".
Base: mug
Affixes: -le
Inflected forms:
form: Muggles
pos: noun
tags: plural
form: muggle
pos: noun
tags: alternative
Senses:
gloss: A person who has no magical abilities.
pos: noun
examples: The magical and the muggle are separated by a river, wide and deep. I could see across, but I couldn't get across, [...].
Once again, THE magic-working Karmidee, marginalized by THE Muggle-ish Normals, are threatened by a coup in THE city's government [...]
In her second outing as a witch — the first being Practical Magic (1998) — Nicole Kidman plays Isabel, a witch who's trying to settle down to the Muggle life of a suburban housewife.
It could all be deadly earnest if she didn't have a sense of humor. My favorite sentence is a chapter title: "Every time you hear a bell, a Muggle has turned magical."
As it was nearing Halloween, we were able to join a potions class where we could change liquids into myriad colours with the addition of substances like dragon spit (muggle’s lemon juice).
There's another guy playing [Bob] Dylan as a formal poet facing some kind of muggle inquisition, but this is the movie's briefest and least consequential thread.
gloss: A person who lacks a particular ability or skill; a non-specialist; (also) a person who is not a member of a group; an outsider or cowan.
pos: noun
tags: broadly
examples: This video game won’t appeal to muggles.
[...] I have finally worked out that the word ECNALUBMA in back-to-front writing translates as 'get out of my way, you Muggle motorist'.
Some activists might know little of this ‘exterior’, such is their facility to move between activist spaces and places without having to encounter the ever-increasingly one-dimensional world in which the ‘muggles’ live.
But to me, remembering what it was like to be a beginner is also an exercise in humility. I see a lot of people wanting to push ahead, faster, in all directions, and I find this to be… woefully out of step with even the Muggles who know me, […]
gloss: A person who lacks a particular ability or skill; a non-specialist; (also) a person who is not a member of a group; an outsider or cowan.
pos: noun
tags: broadly
examples: At some point when you're out geocaching, you'll run into Muggles. The trouble with Muggles is they have no idea what the sport of geocaching is all about. If they see you find a cache, they might get into the cache after you leave—to see what you were up to.
Try not to let the muggles see you find a Cache.
Use Stealth. Commonly used in a place with a high muggle-to-geocacher ratio.
Each time we made a find [Teresa] Hinton would check there were no muggles, or non-geocachers, around before taking the container from its hiding place.
Caches can be hidden in a disguised container, or very small package, and one element of difficulty is hiding caches in urban locations, where the hunter will have to avoid being spotted by ‘muggles’ – the name given to those unaware of the sport. Muggles will be surprised at the scale of the secret game taking place under their noses.
Translations: