garbled
Britishadjective
Explanation
A garbled message makes no sense. If you get a bad phone connection, your friend's message might sound garbled. Or, if you have rewritten the same sentence numerous times, its message might also be garbled. When you were young you may have played the game telephone, where one student thinks up a line, whispers it to his neighbor, who whispers it to his neighbor, and so on, down the line. At the end, the last person to receive the message shouts it out; it usually has nothing to do with what the first person said: it has been garbled along the way. Most of the change is accidental, the price of being human and imperfect — you hear "dope" rather than "hope." Besides messages, facts can get garbled — remember the history test where you wrote 1960 instead of 1860?
Vocabulary lists containing garbled
The Sea of Monsters
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Bridge to Terabithia
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Darius the Great Is Not Okay
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
The group exhibition “To Share a Stomach” is a bit like the children’s game Telephone, in which a phrase, whispered from person to person, inevitably comes out a bit garbled.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 20, 2026
The agendas also contained a distorted periodic table, unreadable phases of the moon and other garbled educational material that parents suspect may have been created using artificial intelligence.
From Salon ● Aug. 15, 2026
If it decides to do nothing, the firm can send an empty or deliberately garbled packet to Eurex.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 16, 2025
Still, the October and November employment estimates are sure to be garbled by the deferred resignations of federal employees.
From MarketWatch ● Dec. 15, 2025
At first I am not sure if they called me because the name sounds so garbled, but when Amanda gives me a nudge, I stand up.
From "A Step from Heaven" by An Na
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Get a wordDefinitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
