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

There will surely be no more high-profile prosecutions, no garbled comments, no worries about age, no selective medical exams, no strange interactions with foreign leaders. —Holly J. Morris, NPR, 13 Dec. 2024

Second improvement: Implement some form of error detection that keeps garbled data from the LCD. —IEEE Spectrum, 31 May 2011

The fairy-tale forest evokes a little girl’s interpretation of the world, a garbled dreamscape of prohibitions and pleasures. —Katy Waldman, The New Yorker, 21 Nov. 2024

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

Word History

First Known Use

circa 1757, in the meaning defined above