Meaning

noun wire for tying up bales of hay

adjective informal or slang terms for mentally irregular

adjective not functioning properly

originFrom 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…

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 3.0