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garbled

adjectiveC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #8,658 of 15,258leans spoken

Garbled means so confused in transmission that the sense is lost. The message arrived, and it makes no sense.

The word applies to messages, recordings and accounts rather than to the original speaker, since something becomes garbled on its way. A garbled message, a garbled transmission, a garbled version of events. Bad phone lines and second-hand retellings both produce them. The verb garble means to mix something up so badly that it misleads, and it once meant to sift, which is a strange journey for a word to make.

Definitions of garbled

  1. 1adjectivegarbledConfused and distorted so that the meaning is lost.C1

    “All they received was a garbled message.”

Where it comes from

  1. Arabic

    غَرْبَلَ — to sift

  2. Medieval Latin

    garbellare

  3. Anglo-Norman

    garbeler — to sift

  4. Middle English

    garbelen

  5. English

    garble

  6. English, today

    garbled

garble comes from Middle English garbelen, from Anglo-Norman garbeler (“to sift”), from Medieval Latin garbellare (or a similar Italian word), from Arabic غَرْبَلَ (“to sift”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove, A Song of Ice and Fire

First appears in chapter 24 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

garbled in the wild

  • The title is garbled Icelandic for "Palace of the Day".

    Hollinndagain

  • The cover and interior illustrations are digitally garbled versions of the cover of Amber.

    Garbage (EP)

  • Over the years this became garbled to "Montelbaanstoren." The castle was never built.

    Montelbaanstoren

  • In the garbled circuit protocol, the function has to be described as a Boolean circuit.

    Garbled circuit

  • The ballad, which is printed in a highly garbled form, tells the story of how Ermenrich is killed by Dietrich von Bern and several other heroes.

    Ermenrichs Tod

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.