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

More than two dozen officials with the National Transportation and Safety Board are on site and have begun sifting through the mangled remnants of a UPS cargo plane that crashed after an engine detached during takeoff near Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport. —Lauren Mascarenhas, CNN Money, 6 Nov. 2025

Jonas Brodin, playing with a mangled finger, scored on a squeaker and had an assist. —Michael Russo, New York Times, 2 Nov. 2025

The rescue team shared photos of the mangled vehicle and the driver walking up the steep ledge with assistance from a rescuer to return to the highway. —Stephen Sorace, FOXNews.com, 16 Oct. 2025

About two hours after the crash, a twisted, mangled helicopter lay upside down across the freeway. —Ishani Desai, Sacbee.com, 7 Oct. 2025

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