mire

noun

1. (countable, uncountable)Deep mud; moist, spongy earth.

   “His laden feet sand and stuck in mire; he was bedaubed with the blue-gray clay from head to foot; but he had escaped the deadly river!”

2. (countable, uncountable)A bog or fen; (in wetland science, specifically) a peatland which is actively forming peat, such as an active bog or fen.

   “Glagolev […] measured CH₄ emission from a mire in West Siberia using a static chamber method. Similar methods had been developed and tested by Nakano et al. (2006), Fig. 1.”

3. (countable, uncountable)An undesirable situation; a predicament.

   “Swansea seemed to be pulling clear of trouble with five wins in their first eight games following head coach Paul Clement's appointment, but two successive defeats had dragged the Swans back into the mire.”

4. (obsolete, rare)An ant.

   “"Having been seriously interrupted by small brown ants or mires working in my cutting bench, digging holes down the side of my cuttings, thereby arresting the process of rooting. […]"”

   “Wen I lay down behine dat log I plunk masef right een one dem aunty mire nest an bout 10 million of dem leetle devil begin to heat me.”

   “The ant figures in the Bestiary, which tells us that the 'mire' is mighty; toils much in summer and in soft weather; stores wood and seed, corn and grass; in winter she is not harmed: she likes wheat, but shuns barley […]”

verb

1. (transitive)To cause or permit to become stuck in mud; to plunge or fix in mud.

   “to mire a horse or wagon”

2. (intransitive)To sink into mud.
3. (figuratively, transitive)To weigh down.
4. (intransitive)To soil with mud or foul matter.

   “Why had I not with charitable hand Took up a beggar’s issue at my gates, Who smirch’d thus and mired with infamy, I might have said ‘No part of it is mine; This shame derives itself from unknown loins’?”

name

1. A surname.