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
• Move, but don’t run willy-nilly or blindly follow a crowd.
  — Marissa Vonesh, Washington Post, 29 Aug. 2023
• What has to stop is the willy-nilly dealing of draft picks, which proved quite reckless in the Terry Rozier trade, a debt that still has to be paid.
  — Ira Winderman, Sun Sentinel, 13 May 2025
• 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
• And yet, Indiana Jones isn’t a franchise to rewrite canon willy-nilly.
  — Vulture, 30 June 2023
• Bubbly is also one of those few things that should never be ordered willy-nilly.
  — Jeff Burkhart, Mercury News, 14 May 2025
• 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
• 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
• The ground moves willy-nilly under collegiate sports every day.
  — San Diego Union-Tribune, 12 Aug. 2023
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• Neither party can get away with willy-nilly redactions just for the sake of avoiding public embarrassment.
  — Erik Wemple, Washington Post, 6 Mar. 2023
• 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
• There’s also a small interior pocket for keeping small, loose items from floating willy-nilly in your bag, so I wasn’t stuck digging for my chapstick all night.
  — Melanie Fincher, Southern Living, 9 May 2025
• 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
• Emotional investors will throw out an entire sector willy-nilly.
  — Brett Owens, Forbes, 9 Jan. 2025
• 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
• Magical tech — which no modern thriller can do without, seemingly — is deployed willy-nilly.
  — Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times, 27 Apr. 2023
• 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
• Their quarterback situation is a mess with all of them throwing interceptions willy-nilly.
  — Hank Gola, New York Daily News, 5 Jan. 2024
• 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
• The willy-nilly assault on friends and foes has shaken global confidence in U.S. reliability.
  — The Wall Street Journal, Twin Cities, 5 May 2025
• 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
• 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
• 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