Word.ws English Dictionary

nutso

UK/ˈnʌt.soʊ/US/ˈnʌ.t͡soʊ/

nutso adjective: crazy, insane.

Adjective

nutso (comparative more nutso, superlative most nutso)

  1. (colloquial) Crazy, insane.
    • "You wanted a report, so here's a full report: crazy, nutso, raisins short of a fruitcake, rubber walls, screaming-mad basket-cases."2000, Zadie Smith, White Teeth, London: Hamish Hamilton, →ISBN
    • "It's a bit scary if you have a difficult boss, and it's out-and-out frightening if you have a completely nutso, maladjusted, irrational, or disturbed boss."2000, Robert Bacal, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Dealing With Difficult Employees
  2. (colloquial) Fraught or out of control.
    • How being taught to not cut corners, even in a nutso emergency room shift, meant I checked all regions in Mary below the waist and didn't just tell her I thought it was probably gas.2005, Phyllis Hollenbeck, Sacred Trust: The Ten Rules of Life, Death, and Medicine, →ISBN, page 40
    • I put my hand to my chest—my heart was going nutso.2010, Alison Seay, Your Mom's a Vampire!, page 1
  3. (colloquial) Obsessed; overly enthusiastic.
    • Even the most nutso fisherman would think twice about going out on the lake today.2001, Kathryn North, Proud Mari, →ISBN, page 7
    • I'm nutso about AnnRice, R.L. Stine, Dean Koontz.2002, Pamela Hayes, The Lie, →ISBN
  4. (colloquial) Ridiculous; unbelievable or silly.
    • Forget the mechanical, materlial, solid model of communication, bring in the invisible but very real web rings. Internet, hacking and so on; puerile conversations of chat pages, insane obsessions with nutso things.2000, Finola Moorhead, Darkness More Visible, →ISBN, page 133
    • Trust me, we both can find fringe fanatics to prove the other side is nutso. So let's stop with this stereotypical silliness.2008, Becky Garrison, The New Atheist Crusaders and Their Unholy Grail, →ISBN, page 55

Noun

nutso (countable and uncountable, plural nutsos)

  1. (colloquial, countable) A crazy person; a crackpot or lunatic.
    • You know, some computer nerd rapist killer nutso builds a fantasy around her, crashes a party whereshe's supposed to be, she laughs himoff, says she'd rather be fuckin' her girlfriends than a pimply little freak--2001, John Sandford, Easy Prey, →ISBN
    • Sadly, at the end of his life, Luther became somewhat of a nutso.2012, A. J. Swoboda, Messy: God Likes It That Way, →ISBN, page 143
  2. (colloquial, uncountable) Craziness; insanity.
    • I wrote a letter to the Guild Newsletter apologizing for having disrupted the show, pleading temporary nutso.2012, Harlan Ellison, An Edge in My Voice, →ISBN
    • I knew she was a crazy bitch, but this is a whole new level of nutso.2014, S.P. Durnin, Keep Your Crowbar Handy, →ISBN

Adverb

nutso (comparative more nutso, superlative most nutso)

  1. (colloquial) Madly; extremely or obsessively.
    • I'm completely, utterly, nutso in love with that man!2012, Susan Donovan, He Loves Lucy, →ISBN
  2. (colloquial) In a crazy manner.
    • I'm working at the ink-jet machine running a job...then I hear a weird noise I but I can't really tell what it is over the sound of the machine right.. .then I think I hear a whimper...all of a sudden my step mom bursts out from her office all nutso saying..."where is your father, where is your...2006, Michael Amore, Loosely Based On Last Thursday, →ISBN, page 102
    • In there was Captain Ed Cutler, whom every man and woman in Maggie's old command had once seen run nutso in Valhalla.2014, Stephen Baxter, Terry Pratchett, The Long Mars, →ISBN

Examples of nutso in a sentence

  • "I was wondering if you had any crazy nutso guy stalking you, or something."2005, G. R. Kirby, Sow the Storm:
  • A nutso relationship is no joke, and no baby should be exposed to that.2013, Tracy Moore, Oops! How to Rock the Mother of All Surprises, →ISBN, page 114:
  • In 1969, one of the wire spoolers goes nutso, breaks off its mooring, the wire lashing about like a horse's tail trying to chase away a fly.2013, Chuck Wendig, Unclean Spirits, →ISBN:
  • Don't get scared when Dani goes nutso over decorations— it's normal and then they change back.2013, Cindi Madsen, Falling For Her Fiance (Entangled Bliss), →ISBN:

Forms of nutso

Adjective
comparativemore nutso
superlativemost nutso
alternative formnutzo
Noun
pluralnutsos
Adverb
comparativemore nutso
superlativemost nutso

Origin of nutso

From nuts + -o.

Questions about nutso

What does nutso mean?
Nutso means crazy, insane.
How do you use nutso in a sentence?
"I was wondering if you had any crazy nutso guy stalking you, or something."
What part of speech is nutso?
Nutso can be an adjective, a noun or an adverb.
How do you pronounce nutso?
Nutso is pronounced /ˈnʌ.t͡soʊ/ (US).

Words near nutso in the dictionary

  1. nutshots
  2. nutshotting
  3. nutsier
  4. nutsiest
  5. nutsiness
  6. nutso
  7. nutsoid
  8. nutsoids
  9. nutsos
  10. nutsucker
  11. nutsuckers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nutso (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:

Cite this entry: “nutso.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/nutso. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.