Other forms: mutilated, mutilating, mutilates
To mutilate is to damage a body or a thing by cutting parts away. Mutilate the body, a mutilated copy, mutilated beyond recognition.
It is a heavy word and belongs to violence, to injury and to serious damage. Of a text or a work it means cutting it about so badly that it no longer works — a mutilated score. Note self-mutilation, which is a clinical term; and that the Latin mutilus means maimed, which is where the whole word comes from.
1verbmutilateTo damage a body or a thing by cutting parts away.
“Someone had mutilated the library book by cutting out all the pictures.”
mutilate is a damaging by cutting.
Latin mutilare comes from mutilus, maimed or docked. The word applied to animals with horns cut off before it applied to anything else.
Latin
mutilātus
English, today
mutilate
Built from
Latin mutilātus, the perfect passive participle of mutilō (“to mutilate”) (see -ate and -ate), itself from mutilus (“maimed”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA