Meaning of mire in English

mire
noun
uk

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/maɪər/ us

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/maɪr/

mire noun (WET EARTH)

[ C usually singular ]
an area of deep, wet, sticky earth
SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases
Geography: wetland
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mire noun (BAD SITUATION)

[ S ] literary
an unpleasant situation that is difficult to escape:
We must not be drawn into the mire of civil war.
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Difficult situations and unpleasant experiences
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Related word

miry
(Definition of mire from the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus © Cambridge University Press)

mire | American Dictionary

mire
noun [ C usually sing ]
us

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/mɑɪər/
an area of deep, wet, sticky earth, or fig. any messy situation:
The cart’s wheels sank in the red mire.
mire
verb [ T ]
us

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/mɑɪər/
to cause something to sink in deep, wet, sticky earth, or fig. to cause someone or an activity to become trapped in a difficult situation:
fig. At the time the country was mired in the Great Depression.
(Definition of mire from the Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary © Cambridge University Press)

Examples of mire

mire
At that time the broad outlines of rebuilding were still deeply mired in contention.
From the Cambridge English Corpus
Their earthly lives are mired in guilt ; even their virtues are just dazzling vices.
From the Cambridge English Corpus
Without this elite support their initiative would have remained mired in obscurity and doomed to failure.
From the Cambridge English Corpus
The topic has been mired in ill-repute for the simple reason that good evidence for fueling sensible theories has been hard to come by.
From the Cambridge English Corpus
Politics, mired as it is in elite domination and the employment of coercive force, is ill-suited to the pursuit of any moral goal.
From the Cambridge English Corpus
In the struggle for influence and authority, the troika, more often than not, was mired in a morass of intrigue and friction.
From the Cambridge English Corpus
How can we overlook the fact that we are mired in the details of daily life and that perfection has always been a destructive dream?
From the Cambridge English Corpus
They hated every moment of the show, and judged the production of cripplingly poor quality, the narrative inexcusably couthy, and its representations mired in stereotype.
From the Cambridge English Corpus
The smallest soil nutrient pools are found in fellfields (because of low soil nutrient concentrations and shallow soils) and mires (because of low soil concentrations and low bulk densities).
From the Cambridge English Corpus
Local subcontractors harness in this way an indigenous labour force that remains mired in poverty and social marginality despite their insertion of their labour into global commodity chains.
From the Cambridge English Corpus
The danger of such a dual structure, if frozen over time, is that of a permanent inshore group mired in poverty juxtaposed against a wealthier offshore sector.
From the Cambridge English Corpus
However, civil society and political culture in some instances remain mired by a lack of political maturity and sophistication and a superficial attachment to economic performance.
From the Cambridge English Corpus
The procedure may have been cosmopolitan (arbitrators drawn from a number of different states impartially enacting international mores and norms) but the substance of the law was mired in statism.
From the Cambridge English Corpus
The remainder is mired in competition, and there are inequalities in that competition.
From Europarl Parallel Corpus - English
Fact: the economy has ever since been mired in such deep recession.
From the
Hansard archive
Example from the Hansard archive. Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0
See all examples of mire
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.
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