CAPRICIOUS

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does capricious mean? 

• CAPRICIOUS (adjective)
  The adjective CAPRICIOUS has 2 senses:

1. changeable

2. determined by chance or impulse or whim rather than by necessity or reason

  Familiarity information: CAPRICIOUS used as an adjective is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• CAPRICIOUS (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Changeable

Synonyms:

capricious; freakish

Context example:

freakish weather

Similar:

unpredictable (not capable of being foretold)

Derivation:

capriciousness (the quality of being guided by sudden unpredictable impulses)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Determined by chance or impulse or whim rather than by necessity or reason

Synonyms:

capricious; impulsive; whimsical

Context example:

the victim of whimsical persecutions

Similar:

arbitrary (based on or subject to individual discretion or preference or sometimes impulse or caprice)

Derivation:

caprice (a sudden desire)

capriciousness (the trait of acting unpredictably and more from whim or caprice than from reason or judgment)

 Context examples 

Well! I dare say I am a capricious fellow, David.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

Yet are you not capricious, sir?

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

She felt excited and strange, and not knowing what else to do, followed a capricious impulse, and, withdrawing her hands, said petulantly, "I don't choose. Please go away and let me be!"

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

So unworldly was he—or so capricious—that he frequently refused his help to the powerful and wealthy where the problem made no appeal to his sympathies, while he would devote weeks of most intense application to the affairs of some humble client whose case presented those strange and dramatic qualities which appealed to his imagination and challenged his ingenuity.

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

He had merely skimmed over the surface of things, observing detached phenomena, accumulating fragments of facts, making superficial little generalizations—and all and everything quite unrelated in a capricious and disorderly world of whim and chance.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

The aunt was a capricious woman, and governed her husband entirely; but it was not in Mr. Weston's nature to imagine that any caprice could be strong enough to affect one so dear, and, as he believed, so deservedly dear.

(Emma, by Jane Austen)

A few slight indications of a rather petted and capricious manner, which I observed in the Beauty, were manifestly considered, by Traddles and his wife, as her birthright and natural endowment.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

He said I was a capricious witch, and that he would rather sing another time; but I averred that no time was like the present.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Old Hannah never wearied of concocting dainty dishes to tempt a capricious appetite, dropping tears as she worked, and from across the sea came little gifts and cheerful letters, seeming to bring breaths of warmth and fragrance from lands that know no winter.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

I saw her, a most beautiful little creature, with the cloudless blue eyes, that had looked into my childish heart, turned laughingly upon another child of Minnie's who was playing near her; with enough of wilfulness in her bright face to justify what I had heard; with much of the old capricious coyness lurking in it; but with nothing in her pretty looks, I am sure, but what was meant for goodness and for happiness, and what was on a good and happy course.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)