Word.ws English Dictionary

go haywire

go haywire verb: to become wildly confused, out of control, or mentally unbalanced.

Verb

go haywire (third-person singular simple present goes haywire, present participle going haywire, simple past went haywire, past participle gone haywire)

  1. (derogatory, informal) To become wildly confused, out of control, or mentally unbalanced.
    • If you feel the autocorrect on your iPhone has gone haywire recently – inexplicably correcting words such as “come” to “coke” and “winter” to “w Inter” – then you are not the only one.2025 November 1, Aisha Down, “Ducking annoying: why has iPhone’s autocorrect function gone haywire?”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

Forms of go haywire

third-person singular presentgoes haywire
present participlegoing haywire
pastwent haywire
past participlegone haywire

Questions about go haywire

What does go haywire mean?
Go haywire means to become wildly confused, out of control, or mentally unbalanced.
What part of speech is go haywire?
Go haywire is a verb.
What is the past tense of go haywire?
The past tense of go haywire is went haywire.

Words near go haywire in the dictionary

  1. go hang
  2. go hard
  3. go hard in the paint
  4. go hard or go home
  5. go hard with someone
  6. go haywire
  7. go Holland
  8. go Hollywood
  9. go home
  10. go hor lan
  11. go horlan

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: go haywire (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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Cite this entry: “go haywire.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/go_haywire. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.