to make or become dirty; to soil or stain something with dirt or filth.
From Middle English 'dirten,' derived from the noun 'dirt' (itself from Old Norse 'drit' meaning excrement) plus the infinitive suffix '-en.' The verb form emerged in Middle English as a way to describe the action of making something unclean.
The word 'dirten' is rarely used today in modern English, but it shows how flexibly English speakers once created verbs from nouns—if you could 'dirt' something, you could 'dirten' it! This kind of suffix flexibility was much more common in Middle English, similar to how we can still say 'darken' or 'lighten' today.
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