haywire Meaning & Definition

Synonyms of Haywire

Haywire in a Sentence

It was working fine until it went haywire and wouldn't stop printing blank sheets.

Those kids go haywire when they don't get what they want.

Word Forms & Grammar

haywire (countable and uncountable, plural haywires)

haywire (comparative more haywire, superlative most haywire)

haywire (third-person singular simple present haywires, present participle haywiring, simple past and past participle haywired)

Words That Rhyme With Haywire

Origin of Haywire

From hay +‎ wire. The original meaning of “likely to become tangled unpredictably or unusably, or fall apart”, as though only bound with the kind of soft, springy wire used to bind hay bales [1] comes from usage in New England lumber camps circa 1905 where haywire outfit became the common term to refer to slap-dash collections of logging tools. To go haywire has since evolved to represent the act of falling apart or behaving unpredictably, as would wire spooled under tension springing into an unmanageable tangle once a piece had been removed from the factory spool, e.g., “he took off the back of his watch, removed a gear and the whole works went haywire.”