How to Use haywire in a Sentence

haywire

adverb or adjective
  • When the stem cells go haywire, the result is leukemia.
    Richard G. "bugs" Stevens, Washington Post, 19 May 2018
  • Even the name of this recipe makes the pleasure sensors in my brain go haywire.
    Amanda Shapiro, Bon Appetit, 19 May 2017
  • Things go haywire from there, with Sach’s new set of guildines, the Paradox Bullets, to guide Ruscha.
    Steff Yotka, Vogue, 6 Oct. 2018
  • At any time, any one of the 15 different ad sets might go haywire.
    Burt Helm, New York Times, 2 Nov. 2017
  • Nagasu felt her nerves kick in as the jump went haywire.
    USA TODAY, 9 Feb. 2018
  • Somewhere along the line, the whole system started to go haywire.
    Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic, 5 Mar. 2018
  • 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
  • Railway tracks have been submerged and sent train schedules haywire.
    Ananya Bhattacharya, Quartz India, 2 July 2019
  • The lighting was great until halfway through the show, when everything went haywire.
    Emilio Fraia, The New Yorker, 9 Dec. 2019
  • The traffic lights in the city were going haywire, causing accidents.
    NBC News, 6 Nov. 2019
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • The past few months have brought a hurricane of horror stories about social media sites gone haywire.
    Carlos Maza, Vox, 21 Sep. 2018
  • Each month, like clockwork, right at the peak of my menstrual cycle, my hormones go haywire and I'm left with a number of whiteheads and blackheads.
    Shammara Lawrence, Allure, 15 Mar. 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
  • This would seem to make the two men sociological soul mates, yet in the morning all goes haywire when Reda pockets Édouard’s iPad and iPhone.
    Jesse Green, New York Times, 18 Nov. 2019
  • 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
  • Within seconds, social media went haywire over the ad, which featured women of all ages.
    Monique O. Madan, miamiherald, 4 Mar. 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
  • Three years have also passed in the film, and the damage wrought in that movie is still being cleaned up — $800 million has been paid out to patrons unlucky enough to have been in attendance when things went haywire.
    Bill Goodykoontz, azcentral, 20 June 2018
  • Previous laws required someone to be there in case something went haywire.
    Dan Sweeney, sun-sentinel.com, 18 June 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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 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 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
  • 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
  • During Venus retrograde, couples may split, revenue streams may go haywire, and beauty blunders may abound.
    Aliza Kelly Faragher, Allure, 19 Dec. 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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