MUD
from
WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006)
mud
n 1: water soaked soil; soft wet earth [syn: {mud}, {clay}]
2: slanderous remarks or charges
v 1: soil with mud, muck, or mire; "The child mucked up his
shirt while playing ball in the garden" [syn: {mire},
{muck}, {mud}, {muck up}]
2: plaster with mud
from
The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48
Mud \Mud\ (m[u^]d), n. [Akin to LG. mudde, D. modder, G. moder
mold, OSw. modd mud, Sw. modder mother, Dan. mudder mud. Cf.
{Mother} a scum on liquors.]
Earth and water mixed so as to be soft and adhesive.
[1913 Webster]
{Mud bass} (Zool.), a fresh-water fish ({Acantharchum
pomotis} or {Acantharchus pomotis}) of the Eastern United
States. It produces a deep grunting note.
{Mud bath}, an immersion of the body, or some part of it, in
mud charged with medicinal agents, as a remedy for
disease.
{Mud boat}, a large flatboat used in dredging.
{Mud cat}. See {mud cat} in the vocabulary.
{Mud crab} (Zool.), any one of several American marine crabs
of the genus {Panopeus}.
{Mud dab} (Zool.), the winter flounder. See {Flounder}, and
{Dab}.
{Mud dauber} (Zool.), a mud wasp; the {mud-dauber}.
{Mud devil} (Zool.), the fellbender.
{Mud drum} (Steam Boilers), a drum beneath a boiler, into
which sediment and mud in the water can settle for
removal.
{Mud eel} (Zool.), a long, slender, aquatic amphibian ({Siren
lacertina}), found in the Southern United States. It has
persistent external gills and only the anterior pair of
legs. See {Siren}.
{Mud frog} (Zool.), a European frog ({Pelobates fuscus}).
{Mud hen}. (Zool.)
(a) The American coot ({Fulica Americana}).
(b) The clapper rail.
{Mud lark}, a person who cleans sewers, or delves in mud.
[Slang]
{Mud minnow} (Zool.), any small American fresh-water fish of
the genus {Umbra}, as {Umbra limi}. The genus is allied to
the pickerels.
{Mud plug}, a plug for stopping the mudhole of a boiler.
{Mud puppy} (Zool.), the menobranchus.
{Mud scow}, a heavy scow, used in dredging; a mud boat.
[U.S.]
{Mud turtle}, {Mud tortoise} (Zool.), any one of numerous
species of fresh-water tortoises of the United States.
{Mud wasp} (Zool.), any one of numerous species of
hymenopterous insects belonging to {Pepaeus}, and allied
genera, which construct groups of mud cells, attached,
side by side, to stones or to the woodwork of buildings,
etc. The female places an egg in each cell, together with
spiders or other insects, paralyzed by a sting, to serve
as food for the larva. Called also {mud dauber}.
[1913 Webster]
from
Jargon File (4.4.4, 14 Aug 2003)
MUD
/muhd/, n.
[acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt.: Multi-User Dimension]
1. A class of {virtual reality} experiments accessible via the
Internet. These are real-time chat forums with structure; they have
multiple `locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat,
traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability
for characters to build more structure onto the database that
represents the existing world.
2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or
verbed; thus, one may speak of going mudding, etc.
Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-
form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the
University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that
game still exist today and are sometimes generically called
BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by
earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked to
the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto: "You
haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is false --
Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain in 1985.
BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark claims on
some maps and posters, which were released and created the myth.
Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the MUD
concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD). Many of
these had associated bulletin-board systems for social interaction.
Because these had an image as `research' they often survived
administrative hostility to BBSs in general. This, together with the
fact that Usenet feeds were often spotty and difficult to get in the
U.K., made the MUDs major foci of hackish social interaction there.
AberMUD and other variants crossed the Atlantic around 1988 and
quickly gained popularity in the U.S.; they became nuclei for large
hacker communities with only loose ties to traditional hackerdom (some
observers see parallels with the growth of Usenet in the early 1980s).
The second wave of MUDs (TinyMUD and variants) tended to emphasize
social interaction, puzzles, and cooperative world-building as opposed
to combat and competition (in writing, these social MUDs are sometimes
referred to as `MU*', with `MUD' implicitly reserved for the more
game-oriented ones). By 1991, over 50% of MUD sites were of a third
major variety, LPMUD, which synthesizes the combat/puzzle aspects of
AberMUD and older systems with the extensibility of TinyMud. In 1996
the cutting edge of the technology is Pavel Curtis's MOO, even more
extensible using a built-in object-oriented language. The trend toward
greater programmability and flexibility will doubtless continue.
The state of the art in MUD design is still moving very rapidly, with
new simulation designs appearing (seemingly) every month. Around 1991
there was an unsuccessful movement to deprecate the term {MUD} itself,
as newer designs exhibit an exploding variety of names corresponding
to the different simulation styles being explored. It survived. See
also {bonk/oif}, {FOD}, {link-dead}, {mudhead}, {talk mode}.
from
Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0
59 Moby Thesaurus words for "mud":
baygall, bog, bottom, bottomland, bottoms, buffalo wallow, clay,
dirt, dust, everglade, fen, fenland, glade, grime, gumbo,
hog wallow, holm, marais, marish, marsh, marshland, meadow, mere,
mire, moor, moorland, morass, moss, muck, mud flat, muddle, muddy,
ooze, peat bog, quagmire, quicksand, rile, salt marsh, slime, slip,
slob, slob land, slop, slosh, slough, sludge, slush, smut, soot,
sough, squash, sump, swale, swamp, swampland, swill, taiga, wallow,
wash
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