Wreak havoc vs. wreck havoc: which is correct?

The short answer

The correct phrase is wreak havoc, meaning to cause widespread damage, chaos, or disruption. Wreck havoc and reeking havoc are both common errors that substitute a more familiar word for the less common verb wreak. Wreck suggests destroying a specific object, like a car, while reek means to smell strongly, neither of which fits the intended meaning of causing chaos.

• Correct: wreak havoc
• Incorrect: wreck havoc
• Incorrect: reeking havoc

What wreak means

Wreak is a verb meaning to cause or inflict something, usually something harmful, forcefully. It almost always appears with a small set of nouns: wreak havoc, wreak vengeance, wreak destruction. The storm wreaked havoc on the coastal town, tearing roofs from houses and flooding the streets. Because wreak rarely appears outside these fixed phrases, many speakers do not recognize it as a standalone word and reach for the more familiar wreck instead.

Wreak can also appear without havoc, though less often, as in the scandal wreaked ruin on his career, showing that the verb itself simply means to cause something destructive. Because these other pairings are rarer still, havoc remains the word most people associate with wreak.

Why wreck havoc is a mistake

Wreck is a common, everyday verb meaning to destroy or ruin something specific, as in she wrecked the car. Because wreck and wreak sound almost identical and wreck is far more familiar, speakers substitute it into the idiom, producing wreck havoc. But havoc is not a physical object that gets wrecked; it is the resulting chaos itself, so the phrase needs the causing verb wreak, not the destroying verb wreck.

Wreck also works as a noun, as in the wreck of the ship, which further pulls speakers toward it, since wreak has almost no independent noun use of its own. That extra familiarity, in speech and in writing, is exactly why wreck havoc keeps reappearing despite being nonstandard.

Why reeking havoc is also wrong

Reek means to give off a strong, unpleasant smell, as in the room reeked of smoke. Reeking havoc likely arises because reek and wreak share a vowel sound, and reek is a more common word in casual speech. But smell has nothing to do with causing chaos, so reeking havoc makes no logical sense, even though it sounds close to the correct phrase.

Wreak havoc in a sentence

Correct: The virus wreaked havoc on the school's computer network for nearly a week (not: wrecked havoc). Correct: Heavy rain is expected to wreak havoc on the evening commute (not: reek havoc). Correct: Office politics can wreak havoc on team morale if left unaddressed. Each example shows a force causing widespread disruption, which is exactly what wreak captures and wreck or reek cannot.

Remember it

Link wreak to its past tense, wreaked, which appears often in news headlines about storms and disasters. If you can recall a headline like storm wreaks havoc, you will remember that wreak, not wreck or reek, pairs with havoc, since both share the same vowel sound as break and speak.