haywire
Plural: haywires
Noun
- Wire used for baling hay; inoperative or out of control.
- wire for tying up bales of hay
- Wire used to bind bales of hay.
Adjective Satellite
- informal or slang terms for mentally irregular
- not functioning properly
- "has gone completely haywire"
Adj
- Roughly-made, unsophisticated, decrepit (from the use of haywire for temporary repairs).
- Behaviorally erratic or uncontrollable, especially of a machine or mechanical process.
Verb
- To attach or fix with haywire.
Examples
- 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.
- When he saw his opponent’s winning play, his brain went HAYWIRE.
Origin / Etymology
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 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."
Synonyms
amiss, around the bend, awry, balmy, barmy, bats, batty, bonkers, buggy, cracked, crackers, daft, dotty, fruity, kookie, kooky, loco, loony, loopy, nuts, nutty, round the bend, wacky, whacky, wrong, baler twine
Scrabble Score: 16
haywire: valid Scrabble (US) TWL Wordhaywire: valid Scrabble Word in Merriam-Webster MW Dictionary
haywire: valid Scrabble Word in International Collins CSW Dictionary