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
Here, though, the meter is mainly a lopsided 7/8, the harmony a mangled G major.
—Alex Ross, New Yorker, 1 Dec. 2025
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
Albuquerque Fire and Rescue’s Facebook post showed photos and video from the crash site showing the mangled upside-down truck with at least one of its headlamps still blinking and surrounded by debris.
—David Chiu, PEOPLE, 6 Nov. 2025
The attack had left one of his legs mangled and necrotic, with the bone badly exposed.
—Jack Beresford, MSNBC Newsweek, 5 Nov. 2025
See All Example Sentences for mangled
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Alex Ross, New Yorker, 1 Dec. 2025
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
Albuquerque Fire and Rescue’s Facebook post showed photos and video from the crash site showing the mangled upside-down truck with at least one of its headlamps still blinking and surrounded by debris.
—David Chiu, PEOPLE, 6 Nov. 2025
The attack had left one of his legs mangled and necrotic, with the bone badly exposed.
—Jack Beresford, MSNBC Newsweek, 5 Nov. 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 20 Dec. 2025.
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