Later Usages
The word muggle, or muggles is now used in various contexts in which its meaning is similar to the sense in which it appears in the Harry Potter book series. Generally speaking, it is used by members of a group to describe those outside the group, comparable to civilian as used by military personnel. Whereas, in the books, muggle is consistently capitalised, in other uses it is often all lower case.
- Muggle was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2003, where it is said to refer to a person who is lacking a skill.
- Muggle is used in informal English by members of small, specialised groups, usually those that consider their activities to either be analogous to or directly involve magic (such as within hacker culture; and Pagans, Neopagans and Wiccans) to refer to those outside the group.
- Muggle (or geomuggle) is used by geocachers to refer to those not involved in or aware of the sport of geocaching. A cache that has been tampered with by non-participants is said to be plundered or muggled.
- The NBC science fiction drama series Heroes features a dog named Mr. Muggles, who is owned by the Bennet family. The writers of the show have stated that the dog's name is an allusion to the Harry Potter series as, like Harry, Claire Bennet has been adopted by a family who does not have any special abilities.
- Muggle is a term used frequently in the Tricking community, most notably to reference non-trickers.
- Los Campesinos! used the term Muggle in their song 'The Sea is a Good Place to Think About the Future'.
- Swuggle is a variation of muggle that is used by open water swimmers to refer to non-swimmers.
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