Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Deprived of some important or characteristic part.
  • In entomology, cut short; greatly abbreviated.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective badly injured, perhaps with amputation or permanent disfigurement.
  • adjective damaged, often deliberately; -- of compositions. Opposite of undamaged or intact.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • verb Simple past tense and past participle of mutilate.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective having a part of the body crippled or disabled

Etymologies

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Examples

  • "My force was standing knee-deep in mutilated bodies, surrounded by the guttural moans of dying people, looking into the eyes of children bleeding to death with their wounds burning in the sun and being invaded by maggots and flies," he later wrote.

    Bystanders to Genocide 2001

  • "My force was standing knee-deep in mutilated bodies, surrounded by the guttural moans of dying people, looking into the eyes of children bleeding to death with their wounds burning in the sun and being invaded by maggots and flies," he later wrote.

    Bystanders to Genocide 2001

  • Other well-known songs are recorded in mutilated versions, and usually sung by professional singers with such a stale perfunctoriness that you seem to smell the whisky and cigarette smoke coming off the record.

    As I Please 1944

  • Sometimes, you may find your most valuable work on coins mutilated by the abstraction of a plate, carried off by some student of numismatics.

    A Book for All Readers An Aid to the Collection, Use, and Preservation of Books and the Formation of Public and Private Libraries Ainsworth Rand Spofford

  • As a minor point, it might be remarked that he is the inventor of what may be called the mutilated villain.

    Through the Magic Door Doyle, Arthur Conan, Sir, 1859-1930 1907

  • Mother named me Rowland, never knowing I'd get out here and have her nice, pretty name mutilated that way.

    Rowdy of the Cross L B. M. Bower 1905

  • As a minor point, it might be remarked that he is the inventor of what may be called the mutilated villain.

    Through the Magic Door Arthur Conan Doyle 1894

  • The mother I knew during my lifetime was a beautiful and vain woman, one who resisted having a mastectomy for breast cancer because she could not bear to be, as she put it, "mutilated" and "disfigured."

    We Remember - Eleanor Hatkin Freedman, 1924 - 1974 2010

  • The mother I knew during my lifetime was a beautiful and vain woman, one who resisted having a mastectomy for breast cancer because she could not bear to be, as she put it, 'mutilated' and 'disfigured.'

    We Remember 2010

  • She had been "mutilated" and written off as a terminal case by several licensed practitioners before García Miranda took charge of her care.

    Pestilence and Headcolds: Encountering Illness in Colonial Mexico 2008

Comments

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  • 1 : to cut up or alter radically so as to make imperfect *the child mutilated the book with his scissors*

    2 : to cut off or permanently destroy a limb or essential part of : CRIPPLE

    synonyms see MAIM

    January 15, 2008