Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for January 11, 2024 is: mangle \MANG-gul\ verb

To mangle something is to ruin it due to carelessness or a lack of skill. Mangle can also mean “to injure or damage something or someone severely by cutting, tearing, or crushing.”

// Half-remembering a joke from her favorite sitcom, Ally mangled the punch line, but honestly this made it even funnier.

[See the entry >](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mangle)

Examples:

“A small tornado with 90 mph winds ripped through Calaveras County early Tuesday morning, uprooting and mangling trees in its wake, the National Weather Service Sacramento office said.” — Ariana Bindman, SFGate.com, 11 Jan. 2023

Did you know?

If you’re an [aficionado](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/aficionado) of ironing appliances, you may be steamed that we did not highlight the noun [mangle](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mangle#h2) (“a machine for ironing laundry by passing it between heated rollers”) or its related [verb](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mangle#h3) (“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](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mangel)), 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](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/butcher#dictionary-entry-2), moving swiftly from applying to a violent action to a figurative use meaning “to bungle.”