Word.ws English Dictionary

bungling

bungling adjective: incompetent or inept. Also the present participle and gerund of bungle.

Adjective

bungling (comparative more bungling, superlative most bungling)

  1. Incompetent or inept.
    • Harry made a bungling attempt to catch the ball.
    • Well, he then decided to manufacture everything as in the human body. I'll show you in the museum the bungling attempt it took him ten years to produce. It was to have been a man, but it lived for three days only. Then up came young Rossum, an engineer. He was a wonderful fellow, Miss Glory. When...c. 1921 (date written), Karel Čapek, translated by Paul Selver, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots): A Fantastic Melodrama […], Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, published 1923, →OCLC, Act...

Noun

bungling (plural bunglings)

  1. An act of incompetence or ineptitude.
    • Your bungling nearly cost us our jobs.

Also used as

bungling is also the present participle and gerund of bungle.

Forms of bungling

Adjective
comparativemore bungling
superlativemost bungling
Noun
pluralbunglings

Origin of bungling

From the verb bungle.

Words formed from bungling

Questions about bungling

What does bungling mean?
Bungling means incompetent or inept.
What part of speech is bungling?
Bungling can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near bungling in the dictionary

  1. bungled
  2. bungler
  3. bunglers
  4. bungles
  5. bunglesome
  6. bungling
  7. bunglingly
  8. bunglings
  9. bungmaker
  10. bungmakers
  11. bungo

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bungling (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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