mud

Mud comes from Middle English mud or mudde, probably borrowed from Middle Dutch mod, modde or Middle Low German mudde, going back to a Proto-Germanic root *mud-, *mudra-. That root may ultimately trace to a Proto-Indo-European word for "moist," *mū- or *mew-, though some scholars instead suspect the Germanic word was borrowed from a Uralic language, pointing to Finnish muta and similar terms meaning "mud" or "earth."

The word has stayed close to its earliest sense throughout its history in English — wet, soft ground — without any major shift in meaning recorded here.

English mother, in the sense of the cloudy sediment that forms in vinegar or alcohol, comes from a suffixed variant of the same Germanic root, linking that murky dregs to the mud underfoot.