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
Iain Macdonald… mangled warplanes lie strewn across the desert floor, their wings and tails torn off, their fuselages punctured.—Richard Wolkomir
Richard Wolkomir2
: 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
Emily MacFarquharExamples of mangled in a Sentence
Recent Examples on the Web
One car’s wheels have been removed; another sports a mangled fender.
—Daniel Miller, Los Angeles Times, 6 Jan. 2026
The other is parked at the dock with a mangled railing.
—Michele Gile, CBS News, 11 Dec. 2025
The girl’s features rearrange and for a split second her whole face looks mangled.
—Literary Hub, 10 Dec. 2025
But there were just as many opportunities to scrape your jaw up off the floor: the mangled drum science of Blawan’s SickElixir, the polyrhythmic abandon of Djrum’s Under Tangled Science, the non-Euclidean geometries of Barker’s Stochastic Drift.
—Philip Sherburne, Pitchfork, 9 Dec. 2025
See All Example Sentences for mangled
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Daniel Miller, Los Angeles Times, 6 Jan. 2026
The other is parked at the dock with a mangled railing.
—Michele Gile, CBS News, 11 Dec. 2025
The girl’s features rearrange and for a split second her whole face looks mangled.
—Literary Hub, 10 Dec. 2025
But there were just as many opportunities to scrape your jaw up off the floor: the mangled drum science of Blawan’s SickElixir, the polyrhythmic abandon of Djrum’s Under Tangled Science, the non-Euclidean geometries of Barker’s Stochastic Drift.
—Philip Sherburne, Pitchfork, 9 Dec. 2025
See All Example Sentences for mangled
Cite this Entry
“Mangled.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mangled. Accessed 9 Jan. 2026.
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