bungle
Part of speech: verb
noun
Morphological type: simple
Etymology: The origin of the verb is uncertain; it is either:
* onomatopoeic in origin (compare bumble (“to act in an inept, clumsy or inexpert manner; to make mistakes”), fumble (“to grope awkwardly in trying to find something; to blunder uncertainly”)); or
* from Old Norse; compare Old Swedish bunga (“to strike”), and dialectal Swedish bangla (“to work ineffectually”).
The noun is derived from the verb.
Cognates
* German Bengel (“cudgel; rude fellow”)
* Middle High German bungen (“to hammer”)
Inflected forms:
form: bungles
pos: verb
tags: present
singular
third-person
form: bungling
pos: verb
tags: participle
present
form: bungled
pos: verb
tags: participle
past
form: bungled
pos: verb
tags: past
form: bungles
pos: noun
tags: plural
Senses:
gloss: To incompetently perform (a task); to ruin (something) through incompetent action; to botch up, to bumble.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: I always had an idea that it would be bungled; but was willing to hope, and am still so. Whatever I can do by money, means, or person, I will venture freely for their freedom; and have so repeated to them (some of the Chiefs here) half an hour ago.
[…] talking in voices that, almost without exception, sounded collegiately dogmatic, as though each young man, in his strident, conversational turn, was clearing up, once and for all, some highly controversial issue, one that the outside, non-matriculating world had been bungling, provocatively or not, for centuries.
gloss: To act or work incompetently; to fumble.
pos: verb
tags: intransitive
examples: Physis is nothing else but the vegetable World, the Universall comprehension of Spermaticall life dispersed throughout. […] For Physis (as I said) is not the divine Understanding it self, but is as if you should conceive, an Artificers imagination separate from the Artificer, and left alone to work by it self without animadversion. Hence Physis or Nature is sometimes puzzeld and bungells in ill disposed matter, because its power is not absolute and omnipotent.
[T]he trooper fails to fasten the brooch. His hand shakes, he is nervous, and it falls off. "Would any one believe this?" says he, catching it as it drops and looking round. "I am so out of sorts that I bungle at an easy job like this!"
gloss: A botched or incompetently handled action or situation; a blunder.
pos: noun
examples: VVherefore this Religious affection vvhich nature has implanted, and as ſtrongly rooted in Man as the feare of death or the love of vvomen, vvould be the moſt enormous ſlip or bungle ſhe could commit, ſo that ſhe vvould ſo ſhamefully faile in the laſt Act, in this contrivance of the nature of Man, that inſtead of a Plaudite ſhe vvould deſerve to be hiſſed off the Stage.
The second figure [of the dance] commenced, and I made a sad bungle; so I did of the third, and fourth, and fifth, for I never had danced a cotillon.
The Soudan bungle was born partly of sentimental loyalty and partly of the aforementioned jealousy existing between the colonies, and now at a time when the colonies should club closer together our Government is doing all they can to widen the breach by trying to pass a bill enabling New South Wales to monopolise the name "Australia".
'I can't allow it,' insisted Carrados, moved by the horror of what he saw impending. 'The man discovered Byles there ever in the dark, and we know how that encounter ended. No, Parkinson, I won't have you sacrificed in the forlorn hope of patching up my bungle.'
Derived words: bungled
bungler
bunglery
bunglesome
bungling
bunglingly
Translations: