V. G. Heiser
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If you’re an aficionado of ironing appliances, you may be steamed that we did not highlight the noun mangle (“a machine for ironing laundry by passing it between heated rollers”) or its related verb (“to press or smooth with a mangle”) for today’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 “to ruin or injure”; 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 “to bungle.”
Synonyms
Examples of mangle in a Sentence
Alison Willmore, Vulture, 1 Aug. 2024
The Tampa Bay Rays’ Tropicana Field was mangled so badly by Category 3 winds that MLB officials are contemplating if the baseball team will need to play in a nearby venue to begin a season that won’t start until March.
—Demarco Williams, Forbes, 23 Oct. 2024
Kevin Dolak, The Hollywood Reporter, 11 Apr. 2024
The film pops and crackles as the cars mangle and the drivers embrace and fight.
—Alec Sutherland, The New Yorker, 10 Apr. 2024
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Cite this Entry
“Mangle.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mangle. Accessed 1 Dec. 2024.
Copy CitationKids Definition
mangle
2 of 3 noun
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