High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! A dangling modifier (a specific case of which is the dangling participle) is an ambiguous grammatical construct, often considered an error in prescriptivist accounts of English, whereby a grammatical modifier could be misinterpreted as being associated with a word other than the one intended, or with no particular word at all. For example, a writer may have meant to modify the subject, but word order makes the modifier seem to modify an object instead. Such ambiguities can lead to unintentional humor or difficulty in understanding a sentence in formal contexts.