How to Use haywire in a Sentence

haywire

adverb or adjective
  • Even the name of this recipe makes the pleasure sensors in my brain go haywire.
    — Amanda Shapiro, Bon Appetit, 19 May 2017
  • At any time, any one of the 15 different ad sets might go haywire.
    — Burt Helm, New York Times, 2 Nov. 2017
  • Somewhere along the line, the whole system started to go haywire.
    — Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic, 5 Mar. 2018
  • Railway tracks have been submerged and sent train schedules haywire.
    — Ananya Bhattacharya, Quartz India, 2 July 2019
  • Previous laws required someone to be there in case something went haywire.
    — Dan Sweeney, sun-sentinel.com, 18 June 2019
  • The lighting was great until halfway through the show, when everything went haywire.
    — Emilio Fraia, The New Yorker, 9 Dec. 2019
  • The past few months have brought a hurricane of horror stories about social media sites gone haywire.
    — Carlos Maza, Vox, 21 Sep. 2018
  • The traffic lights in the city were going haywire, causing accidents.
    — NBC News, 6 Nov. 2019
  • Within seconds, social media went haywire over the ad, which featured women of all ages.
    — Monique O. Madan, miamiherald, 4 Mar. 2018
  • Things go haywire from there, with Sach’s new set of guildines, the Paradox Bullets, to guide Ruscha.
    — Steff Yotka, Vogue, 6 Oct. 2018
  • When the speediest planet goes retrograde, these areas of our lives have the tendency to go haywire.
    — Erika W. Smith, refinery29.com, 5 July 2019
  • But, like the earlier version, the ride turns haywire when the creatures escape and threaten to eat the visitors.
    — Hugo Martin, Los Angeles Times, 18 July 2019
  • Chaotic systems are everywhere in nature, going haywire more or less quickly.
    — Natalie Wolchover, WIRED, 21 Apr. 2018
  • In the places with lots of jobs, primarily coastal cities, the real estate market has gone absolutely haywire.
    — Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic, 13 June 2019
  • During Venus retrograde, couples may split, revenue streams may go haywire, and beauty blunders may abound.
    — Aliza Kelly Faragher, Allure, 19 Dec. 2017
  • The human body goes haywire when hurled into space and away from the familiar environment of the Earth's surface.
    — Anchorage Daily News, 23 June 2019
  • Locales have been changed and other liberties taken, but the crazy way the simple kidnapping plan goes haywire is too amazing to not be real.
    — David Hunter, The Hollywood Reporter, 8 Mar. 2018
  • The body’s immune response can go haywire, overwhelming and sometimes continuing to damage the brain for months.
    — Andrew Joseph, STAT, 13 Apr. 2018
  • In both disasters, a once-obscure flight-control system went haywire, nudging the planes’ noses down until pilots were overwhelmed.
    — Los Angeles Times, 30 Sep. 2019
  • Yet this debate has taken all that to a new level, and making what is left of the conventional political system go haywire in the process.
    — Gerald F. Seib, WSJ, 27 Sep. 2018
  • The inhaler will contain medication to keep your lungs from going haywire, like a short-acting beta agonist to open up your airways.
    — Ashley Abramson, SELF, 26 May 2022
  • Dellin Betances pitched a scoreless seventh to temporarily protect the 5-0 lead, but then things went haywire for the home team.
    — David Waldstein, New York Times, 4 May 2018
  • Yet — and here’s the subtlety in their work — these nonunique extensions of space-time don’t mean that Einstein’s equations go haywire beyond the horizon.
    — Quanta Magazine, 17 May 2018
  • When you are not trained fully, repeatedly, consistently over time, when bad things happen, emotions kick in and that’s when things really go haywire.
    — Jodi S. Cohen, ProPublica, 8 Jan. 2020
  • But after Nijinsky marries one of the company’s ballerinas at the end of the first act, Diaghilev goes haywire and so does the play.
    — Jesse Green, New York Times, 1 Feb. 2018
  • To Jama Software, that sign of early success may actually be a symptom of things going haywire.
    — Mike Rogoway, OregonLive.com, 24 Apr. 2018
  • When Salinger first proposed the arrangement, Claude turned him down, fearing the many things that could go wrong if the president’s visit to a prostitute went haywire.
    — Larry Getlen, Fox News, 24 May 2018
  • Pass rusher is an obvious need for Seattle, especially if anything goes haywire in the contract talks with Frank Clark.
    — Bob Condotta, The Seattle Times, 19 Feb. 2019
  • In other words, patches do occasionally cause things to go haywire, which means that Home users could wade through some wonky updates as Windows 10 evolves.
    — Mark Hachman, PCWorld, 5 Mar. 2019
  • In the film, the world's climate-change control system — a network of satellites built to prevent natural disasters and keep the human population safe — goes haywire.
    — Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter, 22 Oct. 2017

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'haywire.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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