mess
verb/mes/
/mes/
Verb Forms
Idioms Phrasal Verbs| present simple I / you / we / they mess | /mes/ /mes/ |
| he / she / it messes | /ˈmesɪz/ /ˈmesɪz/ |
| past simple messed | /mest/ /mest/ |
| past participle messed | /mest/ /mest/ |
| -ing form messing | /ˈmesɪŋ/ /ˈmesɪŋ/ |
- [transitive] mess something (especially North American English, informal) to make something dirty or untidy
- Careful—you're messing my hair.
- [intransitive] to empty its bowels somewhere that it should not
make untidy
of an animal
Word OriginMiddle English: from Old French mes ‘portion of food’, from late Latin missum ‘something put on the table’, past participle of mittere ‘send, put’. The original sense was ‘a serving of (semi-liquid) food’, later ‘liquid food for an animal’; this gave rise (early 19th cent.) to the senses ‘unappetizing concoction’ and ‘predicament’, on which senses 1, 3 and 4 are based. In late Middle English the term also denoted any of the small groups into which the company at a banquet was divided (who were served from the same dishes); hence, ‘a group who regularly eat together’ (recorded in military use from the mid 16th cent.).
Idioms
See mess in the Oxford Advanced American Dictionarymess with somebody's head
- (informal) to make somebody feel annoyed, anxious or upset
- When they spend all this time on social media, they are seeing things that mess with their heads.
no messing
- (informal) used to say that something has been done easily
- We finished in time, no messing.
not mess around
(British English also not mess about)
- (informal) to do something quickly, efficiently or in the right way
- When they decide to have a party they don't mess around.
Check pronunciation:
mess