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.
Some customers have lambasted the bots on social media, while others prefer them to a garbled voice squawking from a speaker box.
From The Wall Street Journal • Apr. 16, 2026
The anchor offered a garbled 90-second monologue that credited and blamed both sides — if it said anything at all.
From Salon • Jan. 10, 2026
Still, the October and November employment estimates are sure to be garbled by the deferred resignations of federal employees.
From MarketWatch • Dec. 15, 2025
The BBC's science reporter Esme Stallard and other users received a garbled message with her alert.
From BBC • Sep. 7, 2025
The gnomes were running around madly with messages from soldiers to the king, only gnomes have a hard time with longer names and messages, so King Barf’s name always came out a little garbled.
From "Rump: The (Fairly) True Story of Rumpelstilskin" by Liesl Shurtliff
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.
