garbled

adjective

gar·​bled ˈgär-bəld 

: made unclear or confusing : distorted or mixed up

a garbled message

garbled speech

… scientific cranks—those folks who concoct garbled and grandiose pseudo-scientific theories …

—Robert W. Wilson

A garbled group of syllables came over the speaker.

—Tom Clancy

But so much happened afterward to him that his five-day drive from Cracow to Warsaw soon became a garbled fading memory.

—Herman Wouk

Since the algorithm relies on the absolute accuracy of everything it has read to build the file, garbled information could lead to any number of mistakes.

—Paul C. Schuytema

Examples of garbled in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Overhead, dangling from a gigantic black helicopter, is what can only be a massive Bible, but the lettering on the book is garbled, and the cross on the cover has an extra arm. —Miles Klee, Rolling Stone, 5 Sep. 2024

The complaint says the competition that was harmed was between platforms (like X/Twitter and Facebook, for example) but that’s a bit garbled. —Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica, 9 Aug. 2024

Meyers also called out a garbled answer from Trump. —Kevin Dolak, The Hollywood Reporter, 14 Aug. 2024

In the wake of the Trump assassination attempt, the chatbot was sharing garbled and entirely inaccurate details about the incident. —Isabel Fraser, WIRED, 18 July 2024

Word History

First Known Use

circa 1757, in the meaning defined above