FreeScrabbleDictionary

haywire

Valid in Scrabble

Scrabble points
16
Words With Friends
14
Letters
7
Pronunciation
/ˈheɪ.waɪ.ə(ɹ)/(UK)
See all 2 pronunciations
/ˈheɪ.waɪ.ə(ɹ)/(UK) · /ˈheɪ.waɪɚ/(US)

Definition of haywire

4 senses · 3 parts of speech · etymology included

noun

  1. (countable, uncountable)Wire used to bind bales of hay.
    “MOWERS AND HAY RAKES, HAY PRESSES, HAY TIES AND HAY WIRE.”
See all 4 definitions

noun

  1. (countable, uncountable)Wire used to bind bales of hay.
    “MOWERS AND HAY RAKES, HAY PRESSES, HAY TIES AND HAY WIRE.”

adj

  1. Roughly-made, unsophisticated, decrepit (from the use of haywire for temporary repairs).
  2. 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.”
    “"I got phone orders at Tuolumne Meadows to pack up and come over Sunrise Trail. Started at sunrise. Everything haywire, including cranky pack horse which kept getting off trail. Phoned in at Vernal Falls station. Ordered to hurry down, help catch two auto thieves which broke jail just after breakfast. Assigned to guard Coulterville Road.”
    “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.”

verb

  1. (rare, transitive)To attach or fix with haywire.

Definitions from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA.

Etymology

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…

See full etymology

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 you can make from haywire

80 playable · top: WHEY (13 pts)

Best play whey 13 points

5-letter words

3 words

4-letter words

23 words

3-letter words

37 words

2-letter words

16 words

Hooks

1 extension · 1 back

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