To disarrange, to spoil, to confuse.
1848. [I admire nature] even when the rude embraces of autumn have mussed her hair and rumpled her drapery.—Dow, Jun., ‘Patent Sermons,’ i. 94.
1857. ’Fraid I mussed her hair slightly,—it was done up mighty nice, I tell you.—San Francisco Call, Feb. 19: from the Cincinnati Enquirer.
1888. She cast a complacent side glance at the tail of her gown, which she had wheedled out of me by cunning arguments, among which the most powerful was that “’twas getting so mussed and ’twasn’t no sort of a dress for a Ginnel’s wife, no how.”—Mrs. Custer, ‘Tenting on the Plains,’ p. 235.
1862. See Appendix XIV.
