disordered

1. 1
   adjective

   Chaotic and lacking any clear arrangement or order.

   The investigation revealed a disordered web of accounts with no consistent structure.

   After the move, the entire house felt disordered and unsettled.

   Similarchaotic, disorganized, jumbled, messy, haphazard

   Oppositeorderly, organized, tidy, structured

2. 2
   adjective

   Arranged in an incorrect or unexpected sequence.

   The witness gave a disordered account, jumping between events out of sequence.

   The archive arrived disordered, its documents shuffled out of their original sequence.

   Similarjumbled, scrambled, muddled, disjointed, garbled

   Oppositesequential, orderly, chronological, coherent

   Note

   Here the trouble lies in the order of the parts, not in the parts themselves. The word applies to a sequence, such as an account, a list or a shuffled archive, whose items are all present but out of place. That separates it from the "chaotic" meaning, where no clear arrangement exists at all. It matches the verb's narrower use, to knock things out of sequence.

3. 3
   adjective

   Affected by a medical disorder or abnormal physical or mental condition.

   The clinic specializes in patients with disordered sleep patterns.

   Her disordered metabolism required careful monitoring over many months.

   Similarabnormal, dysfunctional, disturbed, irregular, disrupted

   Oppositenormal, healthy, regular

   Note

   Clinical language uses the word before the person or behavior it describes: a disordered gambler, disordered eating, disordered sleep. The phrase marks a condition rather than a passing mood or plain untidiness. A disordered gambler is someone whose gambling amounts to a disorder, not merely someone who gambles carelessly.

4. 4
   adjective

   Mentally deranged or seriously disturbed.

   The diary revealed a deeply disordered mind in its final pages.

   Grief left him disordered, unable to tell memory from imagination.

   Similardisturbed, deranged, unbalanced, unhinged, troubled

   Oppositesane, rational, balanced, lucid

   Note

   Here the disorder sits in the mind itself, and mind is the noun it most naturally attaches to. Boris Sidis in 1919 writes of hearers falling victim to "the fearful visions of a disordered mind." The word describes a state rather than a diagnosis, and that separates it from the medical sense: a disordered mind is unsettled and prey to visions, not necessarily ill.

5. 5
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of disorder.

   The riot disordered the once-quiet streets within minutes.

   Years of neglect had disordered the estate's records beyond easy repair.

   Note

   One form does double duty. It is the simple past (the riot disordered the streets) and the past participle that follows have in the perfect and be in the passive (the records had been disordered). The verb is always transitive, since something disorders something else. Its two meanings, throwing into confusion and knocking out of sequence, carry over into the "chaotic" adjective and the "out of sequence" adjective.

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