Did you mean Willy Billy?
Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adv. Whether desired or not: After her boss fell sick, she willy-nilly found herself directing the project.
- adv. Without order or plan; haphazardly.
- adj. Being or occurring whether desired or not: willy-nilly cooperation.
- adj. Disordered; haphazard: willy-nilly zoning laws.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Will he or will he not; will ye or will ye not; willing or unwilling. See nill, will
- Vacillating; shilly-shallying.
- Also nilly-willy.
Wiktionary
- adv. alternative spelling of willy nilly.
WordNet 3.0
- adv. without having a choice
- adv. in a random manner
Etymologies
- Alteration of will ye (or he), nill ye (or he), be you (or he) willing, be you (or he) unwilling.
Examples
“Then they proceed to throw the name around willy-nilly, with Rudolph mixing in "prosecco.”
“When you go down this road and you start to just willy-nilly - as I believe President Carter has - throwing race out there, you diminish real instances of racism that needs to be addressed.”
“Constitutional head of all military in the US (and a civilian for a reason) ... should just let the military do whatever it wants willy-nilly.”
“He lay on the floor in a loose heap, rolling willy-nilly with every roll of the Elsinore.”
“So long as he walked four miles an hour, he pumped that blood, willy-nilly, to the surface; but now it ebbed away and sank down into the recesses of his body.”
“He abruptly ceased, for at that moment, to enforce his remark, he had placed his hand on Planchette, and at that moment his hand had been seized, as by a paroxysm, and sent dashing, willy-nilly, across the paper, writing as the hand of an angry person would write.”
“The central organizing principle of every single street in America is that people will not start pushing each other, willy-nilly, into traffic.”
“The missions and objectives were never clearly defined, and the self-parodying "search for WMD" in Iraq (lampooned by the president himself at a subsequent press dinner) was a willy-nilly adventure in comic relief -- to wit, Donald Rumsfeld's classic remark that "we know where they are: they're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north somewhat.”
The Huffington Post: Randall Amster: WikiLessons: War Is a Joke, But It Isn't Funny
“It gives us a plausible look at time travel and its potential consequences without having characters popping around through time changing events willy-nilly with no consideration for logic or continuity.”
20 « March « 2009 « Axiom's Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy
“When we arrest people who have hard drug problems, we need to rely much more on things like coerced abstinence from drugs and much less on willy-nilly throwing people into jail.”
Matthew Yglesias » By Request: Your Crime Control Policy On Drugs
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘willy-nilly’.
-
Reduples
Go for it, brothers and sisters! I personally have been suffering long for lack of an open reduplicatives list
happy clappy, bribble-brabble, diddle-daddle, hugger-mugger, kikiriki, Bora-Bora, mahi-mahi, jingle-jangle, knick-knack paddy..., chit-chat, bon-bon, clapperclaw and 286 more...
-
Choi inspired
Fun words my friend loves and others I introduced to him.
Namby-pamby, Niminy piminy, Nitpick, Nit-wit, Piggly-wiggly, Ping-pong, Pitter-patter, Raggle-taggle, Riff-raff, zoot suit, zig-zag, wishy-washy and 73 more...
-
Here and Now
Words related to the mental state of "being in the present in the moment".
improvisation, nolens volens, extempore, autoschediastic, in medias res, willy-nilly, egersis, immanence, nunc pro tunc, spontaneity, observant, concentration and 55 more...
madmouth will he, nill he is a commonly cited antecedent to this phrase, but there's also will I, nill I:
Will I, nill I, the ineffable thing has tied me to him; tows me with a cable I have no knife to cut.
Moby Dick I-LXVII by Melville, Herman Jun 4, 2009
catkisses Reminds me of that old Peter Pan play "I'll send for Tiger Lily! And I'll Send for Peter Pan, we'll be there Willy Nilly!" Sep 4, 2008
oroboros Alternate definition: adj., impotent. --Mensa word list winner 2006 Mar 2, 2007