Muggle
Muggle is a term from the fictional
Harry Potter series of books that refers to a
human who is a member of the non-
magical community. Many students at Harry Potter's school,
Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, come from muggle parents or mixed households with one parent who is a witch or wizard and the other who is not. Children from such families are called
half-bloods or
muggle-borns. Children from full wizarding families are called
pure-bloods. The derisive wizarding word for a child with magical powers when both parents are muggles is
mudblood and is considered a great insult. Those from wizarding families with no magical abilities (very rare) are called
Squibs.
J. K. Rowling said she created the word "muggle" from "mug", an
English term for someone who is easily fooled. She added the "-gle" to make it sound less demeaning. It is unclear if she supposes the wizards to have derived it from the same word. The word "muggle" was added to the
Oxford English Dictionary in 2003, where it is said to refer to a person who is lacking a skill. The term has found its way into more common English usage by those in small specialised groups (such as
geocachers) to refer to those outside the group. See, e.g., [
1].
Inspired by Rowling's work,
Stephen King defines muggles as "unimaginative and often unpleasant adults, who neither understand children nor care to".
The term has also been adopted by groups such as
Pagans,
Neopagans,
Wiccans etc to describe people who are not Pagans. Other words which describe everyone except those in a group include:
strag (non-hitch hiker),
gentile (non-jew),
heathen (believer in a religion other than one's own), and "normal",
lay (non-
magician).
There has been some controversy surrounding the origin of the word, as
Nancy Stouffer, author of the 1984 book "
The Legend of Rah and the Muggles" claimed that she owned the trademark for the word muggle. In 2002, the case was dismissed. In
Zap Comics No. 0 (published 1971), a reference is made to a spliff, referring to it once as a muggle.
Other controversies have occurred in that Roald Dahl's novel,
The Twits, featured a family of Monkeys named the Muggle-Wumps.
*
List of Muggles in the Harry Potter series*
Blood purity (Harry Potter)*
BBC: 'Muggle' goes into Oxford English Dictionary
