haywire
UK/ˈheɪ.waɪ.ə(ɹ)//ˈheɪ.waɪɚ/
haywire noun: wire used to bind bales of hay.
Noun
haywire (countable and uncountable, plural haywires)
- Wire used to bind bales of hay.
- MOWERS AND HAY RAKES, HAY PRESSES, HAY TIES AND HAY WIRE.1886 May 6, W. A. Huffman Implement Company, “Superior Lawn Mowers!”, in Fort Worth Daily Gazette, page 7
- Synonyms:
- baler twine
Adjective
haywire (comparative more haywire, superlative most haywire)
- Roughly-made, unsophisticated, decrepit (from the use of haywire for temporary repairs).
- Behaviorally erratic or uncontrollable, especially of a machine or mechanical process.
- 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.
Verb
haywire (third-person singular simple present haywires, present participle haywiring, simple past and past participle haywired)
- To attach or fix with haywire.
haywire meaning in Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada
haywire in Tamil
- கட்டுப்பாடற்ற, கிறுக்கான, தாறு மாறான
haywire in Malayalam
- erratic, out of control, faulty
- പ്രവർത്തനക്ഷമമല്ലാത്ത, ചൊവ്വില്ലാത്ത, പിടിവിട്ട, കാര്യങ്ങൾ തികച്ചും താറുമാറായിത്തീർന്ന, അലമ്പായ, നിയന്ത്രണാതീതമായി കലാശിച്ച
haywire in Kannada
- ಗೋಜಲು ಗೋಜಲಾದ, ಅಸ್ತವ್ಯಸ್ತವಾದ, ಕಗ್ಗಂಟಾದ, ಸಿಕ್ಕುಸಿಕ್ಕಾದ
Examples of haywire in a sentence
- Everything haywire, including cranky pack horse which kept getting off trail.1928, Horace Marden Albright, Frank J. Taylor, chapter 1, in "Oh, Ranger!": A Book about the National Parks, page 1:
- Temperatures soared—the seas warmed by as much as eighteen degrees—and the chemistry of the oceans went haywire, as if in an out-of-control aquarium.2014, Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Picador, →ISBN, page 103:
Synonyms of haywire
Forms of haywire
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | haywires |
| Adjective | |
| comparative | more haywire |
| superlative | most haywire |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | haywires |
| present participle | haywiring |
| past participle | haywired |
| past | haywired |
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 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.”
Words formed from haywire
Phrases with haywire
Questions about haywire
- What does haywire mean?
- Haywire means wire used to bind bales of hay.
- What is haywire in Tamil?
- Haywire in Tamil is கட்டுப்பாடற்ற, கிறுக்கான, தாறு மாறான. See Haywire meaning in Tamil.
- How do you use haywire in a sentence?
- Everything haywire, including cranky pack horse which kept getting off trail.
- What part of speech is haywire?
- Haywire can be a noun, an adjective or a verb.
- How do you pronounce haywire?
- Haywire is pronounced /ˈheɪ.waɪ.ə(ɹ)/ (UK).
- What is the plural of haywire?
- The plural of haywire is haywires.
Words near haywire in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: haywire (page history and authors); haywire (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); haywire (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license); haywire (Kannada Wiktionary) (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.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-haywire.ogg, en-au-haywire.ogg.
Cite this entry: “haywire.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/haywire. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.