MUDDYING Synonyms: 166 Similar and Opposite Words

muddying

verb

present participle of muddy

as in confusing

to throw into a state of mental uncertainty my mind had been thoroughly muddied by the long hours of exacting work

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Relevance

Antonyms & Near Antonyms

as in obfuscating

to make (something) unclear to the understanding that argument is irrelevant and will just muddy the issue we're trying to resolve

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Antonyms & Near Antonyms

as in staining

to make dirty forgot to take off our shoes and accidentally muddied the kitchen floor

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Antonyms & Near Antonyms

Example Sentences

Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to show current usage. Read More Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

Recent Examples of muddying In more recent drops, FIFA has also introduced Category 1 front-row seating at some games, further muddying the waters. —

Chris Weatherspoon, New York Times, 10 June 2026 The company is now at risk of muddying the waters with both, in an effort to keep investors happy. —

Rohan Goswami, semafor.com, 1 June 2026 Assets worth at least $1 million — which includes the vast majority of real estate in San Francisco — are also grouped together, further muddying the picture. —

Alyce McFadden, San Francisco Chronicle, 2 Apr. 2026 Also muddying the outlook for an end to the crisis is uncertainty about what the United States is trying to achieve. —

Paul Wiseman, Los Angeles Times, 13 Mar. 2026 Also muddying the outlook for an end to the crisis is uncertainty about what the United States is trying to achieve. —

Paul Wiseman, Chicago Tribune, 10 Mar. 2026 Also muddying the outlook for an end to the crisis is uncertainty about what the United States is trying to achieve. —

ABC News, 9 Mar. 2026 As the decades passed, their experiments escalated into increasingly absurd inquiries, muddying the boundaries between subjective and objective reality. —

Shannon Taggart, Artforum, 1 Feb. 2026 This may be because the nucleus accumbens, the other reward region that some participants learned to ramp up, didn’t have the same connection to immune response, muddying the results. —

Allison Parshall, Scientific American, 19 Jan. 2026

Recent Examples of Synonyms for muddying

Verb

Cancers can release this protein into the tumor microenvironment, where the molecule attaches to the T cells and change their ability to communicate with other cells, confusing the T cells and restricting their ability to survive and kill cancer.

— Charles J. Dimitroff, The Conversation, 12 June 2026
While the numbers, nutrients, and ingredient lists may seem confusing at first, learning how to read nutrition labels can tell you a lot about what’s actually in the food.

— Amy Brownstein, Verywell Health, 10 June 2026