How to Use willy-nilly in a Sentence
willy-nilly
adverb or adjective-
The double order is emerging, as the masters of the chessboard, willy-nilly, make room for the web.
—Anne-Marie Slaughter, Foreign Affairs, 4 Oct. 2016
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Move, but don’t run willy-nilly or blindly follow a crowd.
—Marissa Vonesh, Washington Post, 29 Aug. 2023
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That’s a big deal, because the brain is not just willy-nilly making more cells left and right and using up all its energy.
—Nicholas Stfleur, STAT, 12 Apr. 2024
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And yet, Indiana Jones isn’t a franchise to rewrite canon willy-nilly.
—Vulture, 30 June 2023
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These are the people who, despairing of finding their way out honestly, simply smash and bash their way through the corn willy-nilly.
—Tribune News Service, The Mercury News, 19 Oct. 2024
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The study shows what might happen to the world if people keep polluting willy-nilly before finding a way to take those CO2 emissions out of the atmosphere.
—Justine Calma, The Verge, 26 July 2023
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The ground moves willy-nilly under collegiate sports every day.
—San Diego Union-Tribune, 12 Aug. 2023
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You might be jammed onto a bus with a horde of others, maybe even separated from your friends, and then poured into balloons willy-nilly.
—Marla Jo Fisher, Chicago Tribune, 5 Feb. 2025
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There is something so counterintuitive about the claim that God became human that the minds of those who but entertain the notion change willy-nilly.
—Robert Barron, WSJ, 4 Jan. 2024
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Coppola followed suit, hopping from state to state willy-nilly with his crew in search of what Natalie’s story would be, with no idea how his film was going to end.
—David Kamp, New York Times, 1 Dec. 2023
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The good news is cutting you lawn with meticulous precision doesn’t really take much more time than cutting it willy-nilly.
—Bradley Ford, Popular Mechanics, 4 Aug. 2023
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The van has been stuffed willy-nilly with two copies each of some 3000 periodicals printed recently in France that are being sent to the library for preservation.
—Ariel Bleicher, IEEE Spectrum, 28 Feb. 2011
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America First’s members thought the country was being sucked willy-nilly into a second World War, barely two decades after the first one ended in 1919.
—Ron Grossman, Chicago Tribune, 29 Sep. 2024
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Small plates of succulent lamb, marinated eggplant, and flaky nut pastries arrive willy-nilly, adding to the eatery’s distinct charm.
—Megan Wood, Travel + Leisure, 14 Nov. 2023
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Neither party can get away with willy-nilly redactions just for the sake of avoiding public embarrassment.
—Erik Wemple, Washington Post, 6 Mar. 2023
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Who at Fox News ever — ever — would have supposed that the guy willing to smear others willy-nilly would similarly bash his colleagues?
—Erik Wemple, Washington Post, 24 Apr. 2023
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And this talisman has ripped a hole in the fabric of space and time, hence the various Marvels, captains and otherwise, being teleported willy-nilly.
—David Fear, Rolling Stone, 10 Nov. 2023
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Emotional investors will throw out an entire sector willy-nilly.
—Brett Owens, Forbes, 9 Jan. 2025
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Hundreds of sports event media passes hang haphazardly on a cork board on one wall, while 47 Bruce Springsteen tickets and a concert set list are thumb-tacked, willy-nilly, to another board on a nearby wall.
—Cynthia Billhartz Gregorian, Kansas City Star, 30 Jan. 2024
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Magical tech — which no modern thriller can do without, seemingly — is deployed willy-nilly.
—Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times, 27 Apr. 2023
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As such, postmodern styles are dislodged from any specific historical moment, and styles from across time can be mixed together willy-nilly.
—Allen Farmelo, Robb Report, 16 July 2024
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Their quarterback situation is a mess with all of them throwing interceptions willy-nilly.
—Hank Gola, New York Daily News, 5 Jan. 2024
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Instead of booking trips willy-nilly, why not point your compass towards your astrological sign, which can serve as a guide to picking a vacation destination that’s best suited to your birth chart.
—Krista Simmons, Sunset Magazine, 19 Dec. 2023
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Yet, willy-nilly, existing autism research findings, and the resultant therapies and educational strategies, have been applied across the board to all autistics.
—Time, 31 July 2023
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This is largely true of any Rolex model, and the confusion is largely the result of Rolex being an industrial juggernaut that used interchangeable parts willy-nilly without keeping records.
—Allen Farmelo, Robb Report, 26 Sep. 2024
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If their outermost electrons could be oriented willy-nilly, as classical theory predicted, the deflected atoms would be expected to form a single broad smear along the detector plate.
—Leila Sloman, Quanta Magazine, 6 Dec. 2023
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Because recent chief executives have become far too comfortable at using prosecutorial discretion as a tool for willy-nilly rewriting statutes that otherwise seem crystal clear.
—Stephen L. Carter, The Mercury News, 23 Jan. 2025
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'willy-nilly.' 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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