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WORD OF THE DAY

January 11, 2024

mangle

verb | MANG-gul

What It Means

To mangle something is to ruin it due to carelessness or a lack of skill. Mangle can also mean â€œto injure or damage something or someone severely by cutting, tearing, or crushing.â€
// Half-remembering a joke from her favorite sitcom, Ally mangled the punch line, but honestly this made it even funnier.
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Examples of MANGLE

â€œA small tornado with 90 mph winds ripped through Calaveras County early Tuesday morning, uprooting and mangling trees in its wake, the National Weather Service Sacramento office said.â€ â€” Ariana Bindman, SFGate.com, 11 Jan. 2023

Did You Know?

If youâ€™re an aficionado of ironing appliances, you may be steamed that we did not highlight the noun mangle (â€œa machine for ironing laundry by passing it between heated rollersâ€) or its related verb (â€œto press or smooth with a mangleâ€) for todayâ€™s Word of the Day. You may even believe we mangled it! We concede, even if we fail to entirely smooth things over, that mangle is a perfectly fine word, coming as it does from the Dutch word mangel (not to be confused with the beet), but it is less commonly encountered than the mangle that means â€œto ruin or injureâ€; that mangle is unrelated, coming instead from Anglo-French. Its path in English has followed a trajectory similar to that of butcher, moving swiftly from applying to a violent action to a figurative use meaning â€œto bungle.â€

Name That Synonym

What synonym of mangle in its milder use has 4 letters and begins with â€œfâ€?

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