Name mangling is a way of making a name (like the name of a variable or a function) longer so it's harder to guess. It's like when you have a name like "Bob" and you change it to something like "Bo77y" so it's harder for someone else to figure it out. Name mangling usually happens when a program is written in a programming language like C++, where the programmer wants to make sure that the names of their variables and functions stay unique and don't get mixed up with someone else's.