murk

What does murk mean?

To murk (or “merk,” to use an alternate spelling) someone is to kill, defeat, dominate, overwhelm, destroy, etc., them.

Examples of murk

The Louis Vuitton black down jacket is plain vicious. Bold, yet muted, simultaneously. This is the second week in row Tucker murked the outerwear game.
—Wosny Lambre, The New York Times, 19 Nov. 2019

How many lesser known ways did people get merked on Titanic?
—@tantamle, Reddit, 8 Aug. 2024

The Seattle Kraken mascot almost gets MURKED by a bear :flushed:
—@OldRowSports, X (formerly Twitter), 1 Aug. 2025

Luka just murked the Mavs like Kylo did Han Solo
—@ryanbergara, BlueSky, 9 Apr. 2025

Where does murk come from?

The origins of the verb murk are, well, murky, though the word may have first emerged in early 1990s’ hip-hop, or earlier, though with a different meaning:

“Murk,” which means “to murder,” or “to defeat,” didn’t start out meaning that. It first appears in 1994, ambiguously, in “Real Circus,” by Saafir, in Oakland: “I submerged like a / Murk on the Mental.” It then appears in New York, conventionally, in 1998, in “Treat$,” by the Beatnuts, from Queens: “They try to prosecute me but I murk they only witness.”
—Alec Wilkinson, The New Yorker, 1 Apr. 2013

Early evidence in print reflects the primary sense of “to kill” as well as both major spellings:

… told a witness, who testified at trial, “The … guy owed me money and I had to merk him.”
—Kim Martineau, The Times Union (Albany, New York), 3 Nov. 2000

… told him and two other friends that he “murked” a man—street slang for “murder or kill”—during a struggle.
—Bob Mitchell, The Toronto Star, 3 Aug. 2005

But just as murder, kill, and a slew of other words also have figurative uses of “defeat,” “overwhelm,” “dominate,” etc., so does murk/merk.

“Murking” (sometimes “marking”) means to destroy (especially verbally), and derives from the tradition of battles between sound systems in Jamaica where DJs competed to play the best records the loudest. A winning DJ would be said to have “murked” their rival, and this has been extended to apply to a verbal contest (as in a battle between rappers), and to any inventive verbal demolition or denigration.
—Jonathan Hope, The Times Literary Supplement (London), 30 June 2006

How is murk used?

In print, murk is used frequently in the context of video games …

Elden Ring is hard stuff. The bosses don’t mess around and will quickly bury you if you’re not careful. I mean, I’m constantly getting murked by the Magma Wyrm …
—Jeremy Winslow, Kotaku, 17 June 2022

… but it also still appears in all of the aforementioned contexts, including crime and sports.