1 [C,U] a piece of body tissue that you tighten and relax in order to move a particular part of the body; the tissue that forms the muscles of the body:
a calf / neck / thigh muscle * to pull / tear / strain a muscle * This exercise will work the muscles of the lower back. * She tried to relax her tense muscles. * He felt every muscle in his body tighten. * He didn't move a muscle (= stood completely still).
2 [U] physical strength:
He's an intelligent player but lacks the muscle of older competitors.
3 [U] the power and influence to make others do what you want:
to exercise political / industrial / financial muscle
muscled adjective:
heavily muscled shoulders
IDIOMS see FLEXv.
Part of speech: verb
PHRASALVERBS
muscle in (on sb/sth) (informal, disapproving) to involve yourself in a situation when you have no right to do so, in order to get sth for yourself
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for muscle is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is muscle a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, muscle is tagged as noun.
Does muscle appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — muscle appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
