wonky

English

WOTD – 25 April 2009

From English dialectal wanky, alteration of Middle English wankel (“unstable, shaky”), from Old English wancol (“unstable”), from Proto-West Germanic *wankul (“swaying, shaky, unstable”).

wonky (comparative wonkier, superlative wonkiest)

Lopsided, misaligned or off-centre.
Synonyms: awry, misaligned, skew-whiff
(chiefly Britain, Australia, New Zealand) Feeble, shaky or rickety.
Synonym: rickety
- 1932, Frank Richards, The Magnet: The Terror of the Form:
  It seemed likely that he would need First Aid when those wonky steps yielded, at length, to the well-known law of gravitation.
(informal, computing, especially Usenet) Suffering from intermittent bugs.
Synonyms: buggy, broken
(informal) Generally incorrect.

wonky (uncountable)

(music) A subgenre of electronic music employing unstable rhythms, complex time signatures, and mid-range synths.
- 2015, Jan Kyrre Berg O. Friis; Robert P. Crease, Technoscience and Postphenomenology: The Manhattan Papers:
  By the late 2000s, dubstep had splintered into numerous factions, from brostep to wonky to the evocative “purple,” […]

wonk +‎ -y

wonky (comparative wonkier, superlative wonkiest)

Technically worded, in the style of jargon.
- 2009, Jesse Dale Holcomb, Faith, Science and Trust: Climate Change Framing Effects and Conservative Protestant Opinion
  Climate change is an issue that might lend itself more easily to thematic framing in the news, due to the often highly technical and wonky language required to explain it.
- 2010, Michael Maslansky, Scott West, Gary DeMoss, David Saylor, The Language of Trust: Selling Ideas in a World of Skeptics
  McCain's message, while similar in content and equally as valid, is lost in the minutiae of “'high-risk' pools” and wonky jargon.

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