Word.ws English Dictionary

went haywire

went haywire is the simple past of go haywire.

Meaning of go haywire

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

Questions about went haywire

What is went haywire the simple past of?
Went haywire is the simple past of go haywire.

Words near went haywire in the dictionary

  1. went ham
  2. went hand in hand
  3. went hang
  4. went hard
  5. went hard in the paint
  6. went haywire
  7. went Hollywood
  8. went home
  9. went horribly right
  10. went hostile
  11. went hungry

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: went haywire (page history and authors); 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.

Last updated:

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