/hæv ə ˈskɹuː ˈluːs/
English idiom, informal. Someone is a bit crazy, or is acting as if they’ve lost their mind.
Draft Not yet checked by a native English speaker.
How do people use To have a screw loose
?
Informal and usually a bit mocking, so keep it for friends, gossip and the odd exasperated remark. You’ll hear it with a name or a pronoun (“Tom has a screw loose”, “he’s got a screw loose”) and in the past (“he must have had a screw loose”). People often add “somewhere” or bump it up to “a few screws loose” for extra effect.
Also said have got a screw loose, have a few screws loose
To have a screw loose
in real sentences
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Tom has a screw loose.
Tatoeba, sentence by CK, CC BY 2.0 FR
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He probably had a screw loose.
Tatoeba, sentence by Nylez, CC BY 2.0 FR
Where does To have a screw loose
come from?
The picture is a machine with a loose screw: it still runs, just not quite right. Etymonline dates the “slightly mad” sense to 1810. English Wiktionary quotes Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds (1870s) and lists it in John Camden Hotten’s Slang Dictionary (1873); around the same time “a screw loose between you” also meant something had gone wrong in a relationship (Wiktionary quotes 1830). A popular story ties it to 18th-century cotton mills, but nobody has produced evidence for that.
Mistakes learners make with To have a screw loose
For learners of English: moving the words around. It’s always “a screw loose”, with “loose” after the noun. “He has a loose screw” sounds like you’re talking about a piece of furniture, and dropping the article (“he has screw loose”) sounds wrong.
Other English idioms like To have a screw loose
Spot a mistake in To have a screw loose
?
Send a correction, or a sentence you’d actually say with it. Everything is read before anything on this page changes.