Garble

 WORD OF THE DAY

garble / verb / GAR-bul

Definition
1a: to so alter or distort as to create a wrong impression or change the meaning
1b: to introduce textual error into (a message) by inaccurate encipherment, transmission, or decipherment

2: to sift impurities from

3 (archaic): cull

4: an act or an instance of garbling

5: the impurities removed from spices in sifting

Examples

"We aren't very good as human beings at having good conversations in the first place, and then everything switched to Zoom, where body language often gets lost and signals get garbled."
— Andreas Kluth, quoted in The Daily Herald (Everett, Washington), 25 Dec. 2021

In 2013, Sahai and five co-authors proposed an iO protocol that splits up a program into something like jigsaw puzzle pieces, then uses cryptographic objects called multilinear maps to garble the individual pieces.
— Quanta Magazine, 10 Nov. 2020

Did You Know?
Garble developed from Late Latin cribellare, a verb meaning "to sift." Arabic speakers borrowed cribellare as gharbala, and the Arabic word passed into Old Italian as garbellare; both of these words also meant "to sift."
When the word first entered Middle English as garbelen, its meaning stayed close to the original; it meant "to sort out the best." But that sort of sifting can cause a distortion, and in early Modern English garble came to mean "to distort the sound or meaning of."