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.
Garbled newspaper reports made his resolutions seem more radical than they were, and other assemblies then hastened to match or exceed Virginia’s stance.
From Textbooks • Jan. 18, 2018
Garbled lines of text riddled with stray question marks.
From Reuters • Oct. 1, 2013
Tellicherry Garbled Special Extra Bold, officially the highest-quality black pepper in the world, has a biting heat but a distinctive fresh, fruity, woody aroma.
From The Guardian • Aug. 22, 2012
Garbled and often wholly unintelligible, the transcript gave Coloradans an interesting insight into the informality with which its elected officials discharge their public duties.
From Time Magazine Archive
Garbled versions of the truth ran excitement up to hot-blood heat.
From Rimrock Trail by Dunn, J. Allan, (Joseph Allan)
Definitions 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.
