vagary
Pronunciation Noun
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Pronunciation Noun
vagary (plural vagaries)
- An erratic, unpredictable occurrence or action.
- 1871, Charles Kingsley, At Last: A Christmas In The West Indies, ch. 8:
- It now turns out that the Pitch Lake, like most other things, owes its appearance on the surface to no convulsion or vagary at all, but to a most slow, orderly, and respectable process of nature, by which buried vegetable matter, which would have become peat, and finally brown coal, in a temperate climate, becomes, under the hot tropic soil, asphalt and oil.
- 1871, Charles Kingsley, At Last: A Christmas In The West Indies, ch. 8:
- An impulsive or illogical desire; a caprice or whim.
- 1905, Jack London, War of the Classes, Preface:
- And then came the day when my socialism grew respectable,—still a vagary of youth, it was held, but romantically respectable.
- 1905, Jack London, War of the Classes, Preface:
- (impulsive or illogical desire) see Thesaurus:whim
- French: extravagance
- German: Unwägbarkeit
- Portuguese: extravagância
- Russian: вы́ходка
- Spanish: extravagancia, rareza
This text is extracted from the Wiktionary and it is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license | Terms and conditions | Privacy policy 0.002