mangled

adjective

man·​gled ˈmaŋ-gəld 

1

: severely injured or damaged by cutting, tearing, or crushing

a mangled foot

A special bed—a box lined with cottonwool—was made for the mangled pigeon while the Wilsons nursed it …

—Iain Macdonald

… mangled warplanes lie strewn across the desert floor, their wings and tails torn off, their fuselages punctured.

—Richard Wolkomir

2

: spoiled or made incoherent

a mangled message

mangled punctuation/syntax

This is a draft manuscript waiting for an editor to impose coherence and to smooth over mangled grammar, malapropisms and political oversimplifications.

—Emily MacFarquhar

Examples of mangled in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

When the smoke lifted, the disaster left a ledger—four in five structures lost; neighborhoods and the business core pressed flat into a grid of ash and mangled steel. —Literary Hub, 13 May 2026

News video from the scene showed the mangled motorcycle pressed against the center divider as the CHP investigated the crash. —City News Service, Daily News, 9 May 2026

Photos from the scene showed the mangled tractor-trailer flipped onto its side onto the grass next to the highway. —Colleen Cronin, Boston Herald, 27 Apr. 2026

The nose of the aircraft appeared torn off, leaving mangled parts of the front of the plane dangling toward the ground. —Minyvonne Burke, NBC news, 24 Mar. 2026

Word History

First Known Use

15th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Rhymes for mangled

• angled
• dangled
• fangled
• jangled
• spangled
• strangled
• tangled
• wrangled
• disentangled
• entangled
• newfangled
• untangled