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

One of his fingers looked mangled. —Natasha Korecki, NBC news, 14 Feb. 2026

After midnight, one evening in late January, a doctor ushered a young man with a mangled hand into her car and sped to a private clinic on the outskirts of Tehran. —Cora Engelbrecht, New Yorker, 11 Feb. 2026

The victim was pronounced dead at the scene, her body visible outside the mangled silver sedan. —City News Service, Daily News, 4 Feb. 2026

Another neighbor’s fence was now mangled metal covered in tree parts. —Erin Austen Abbott, The Atlantic, 1 Feb. 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