Word.ws English Dictionary

flyaway

flyaway adjective: disposed to fly away; unrestrained; light and free.

Adjective

flyaway (not comparable)

  1. Disposed to fly away; unrestrained; light and free.
  2. Flighty; frivolous
  3. Soft, light, unruly, and difficult to set into a style.
    • [...] and Lorene mumbled thanks, and slid out of the booth again, a big boned, pretty girl with a tiny pearl glinting above her eye and flyaway streaked hair [...].2001, Joyce Carol Oates, Middle Age : A Romance (paperback), Fourth estate, page 231

Noun

flyaway (plural flyaways)

  1. A stray hair that is difficult to style.
    • Consequently, there is a swell of hair care regimens, including serums, gels, balms, creams and sprays promising moisture-rich curls, without frizz or flyaways.2007 January 18, Marcelle S. Fischler, “Taming Frizz and Setting Curls Free”, in New York Times
  2. Anything that is difficult to capture or restrain.
    • But Truth is such a flyaway, such a slyboots, so untransportable and unbarrelable a commodity, that it is as bad to catch as light.1838 July 24, Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Literary Ethics. An Oration Delivered before the Literary Societies of Dartmouth College, July 24, 1838”, in Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (Emerson’s Complete...
  3. A kind of dismount from bars that incorporates one or more flips or twists.
  4. A portable satellite television antenna.
    • Unless the TV crew has its own flyaway, the locals can still defeat a story they couldn't prevent reporters from covering by cutting it off at the pass, when it is being birded through their facilities.1995, David D. Pearce, Wary Partners: Diplomats and the Media, page 43
  5. A situation where an operator loses control of a drone.
    • "But the Civil Aviation Authority is very worried about 'flyaway' - if someone has bought a GPS jammer on eBay because they don't want drones near their house, it can cause drones to get completely lost and shoot off in a random direction until they run out of battery.2025 July 23, Paul Clifton, “Air force: drones' developing railway role”, in RAIL, number 1040, page 29

Forms of flyaway

Adjective
alternative formfly-away
Noun
pluralflyaways

Origin of flyaway

From fly + away.

Words formed from flyaway

Phrases with flyaway

Questions about flyaway

What does flyaway mean?
Flyaway means disposed to fly away; unrestrained; light and free.
What part of speech is flyaway?
Flyaway can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near flyaway in the dictionary

  1. flyabilities
  2. flyability
  3. flyable
  4. flyaround
  5. flyarounds
  6. flyaway
  7. flyaway cost
  8. flyaway costs
  9. flyaway glasses
  10. flyaway grass
  11. flyaway spectacles

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: flyaway (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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