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Glite Dictionary
🤐 To speak unclearly 🤐 A soft sound 👶 To chew without teeth
to mumble

to mumble

1 8.9
To chew food using the gums when you have no teeth
  • verb
  • /ˈmʌmbəl/
  • Archaic
translation icon : masticar con las encías

Examples

  • He mumbles his food and has to be reminded to swallow.

    Fiction book (1996)

  • He heard Pearl mumble some of her baby gibberish and looked around the corner of the settee to see her seated on the floor.

    Fiction book (1995)

  • She was so worked up she couldn't form words; she just pointed at the food stand and mumbled gibberish like a baby.

    Fiction book (1992)

  • He had his own temple, via which he had made a fortune mumbling sutras at funerals.

    Fiction book (1998)

  • "What are you mumbling about?" Martha rubbed her cheek against the baby's coarse blanket.

    Fiction book (1994)

  • She was so tired that she could only mumble while chewing her food.

  • The baby could mumble as he struggled to eat without teeth.

  • He mumbled softly, moving his gums to get his breakfast down.

Synonyms

to gum
vsto mumble
1 9.1

To chew food slowly using the soft tissue around the teeth because they have few teeth

chews without teeth by moving jaws and soft mouth tissue with difficulty

Compounds

mumble-the-peg
  • Archaic
9.9

A children's game where players throw a small knife to make it stick in the ground

Surface Forms

mumble infinitive
mumbled past
mumbled past participle
mumbling present participle
mumbles third person singular

Morphology

mumble = mum (opaque) = mum + le

The sense 'to chew food without teeth' is an extended or dialectal meaning not predictable from 'mum' + '-le', so learners will not infer it from the base.

Etymology

Mumble can also mean 'to chew with the gums', and a helpful way to remember this is to imagine the quiet mouth movement that makes a mumble sound when you have no teeth, so the word came to mean gently gumming food.