How to Use capricious in a Sentence

capricious

adjective
Definition of capriciousnext
Synonyms for capriciousnext
  • The court ruled that the punishment was arbitrary and capricious.
  • Timing is tricky in the modern music business, especially with how capricious viral success can be on the charts.
    — Hannah Dailey, Billboard, 4 Sep. 2024
  • But the capricious nature of the disease made that hard.
    — Sandy Banks Columnist, Los Angeles Times, 29 Nov. 2020
  • Trump’s statecraft is a response to a changing world and to demand signals from the U.S. electorate, not a capricious effort to take apart the world that the United States made.
    — Charles Kupchan, Foreign Affairs, 9 Sep. 2024
  • Wang wanted to find the most capricious radio signals in the sky.
    — Max G. Levy, Wired, 24 Feb. 2021
  • The court ruled that the increase was arbitrary and capricious.
    — Los Angeles Times, 13 Sep. 2019
  • To pick against my childhood team might be seen as the best way to pull one over on the capricious gods of baseball.
    — The New York Times, New York Times, 4 Oct. 2016
  • The court ruled the increase was arbitrary and capricious.
    — Washington Post, 14 Sep. 2019
  • No doubt about it, the spring weather for the past few years has been, to put it politely, capricious.
    — Roxie Hammill, kansascity.com, 29 Apr. 2017
  • Some are subject to the whims of capricious billionaires.
    — Matthew Miles Goodrich, The New Republic, 6 Mar. 2023
  • Similar scenes played out all over the metro area, a reminder of the capricious nature of storms.
    — Bryn Stole, NOLA.com, 29 Oct. 2020
  • The judge is abusing the arbitrary and capricious standard.
    — Noah Feldman Bloomberg Opinion (tns), Star Tribune, 28 Jan. 2021
  • The gaps in resources and talent between the Wisconsins and the Winthrops have been winnowed by the effects of a capricious virus.
    — New York Times, 22 Mar. 2021
  • Investors may be capricious, but the market's math is a stubborn thing.
    — Shawn Tully, Fortune, 13 Oct. 2020
  • Their capricious nature will make for a nerve-wracking eclipse day.
    — USA TODAY, 26 Mar. 2024
  • Teach, Donny’s capricious and foul-mouthed friend, barges into the shop mid-lecture.
    — Lovia Gyarkye, The Hollywood Reporter, 14 Apr. 2022
  • All of which makes the decision to ban Parler seem somewhat capricious.
    — Gilad Edelman, Wired, 13 Jan. 2021
  • But a virus this capricious could thwart further efforts by the N.F.L. to return to something that feels like normal.
    — Ben Shpigel, New York Times, 7 Oct. 2020
  • Myth #4: AI is a machine that is trustworthy and will do as it is told, while humans are capricious and act on whims.
    — Lance Eliot, Forbes, 2 May 2022
  • Often the wheel, spun by the blind and capricious goddess of fortune, features a royal figure trying to cling to it.
    — Jason Zweig, WSJ, 4 Sep. 2020
  • That all should add even more unpredictability to a league that can be quite capricious.
    — Jim Reineking, USA TODAY, 25 Feb. 2023
  • Burrows played a god, one of a capricious little trio of grandes dames, with Mia Katigbak and Annie Golden.
    — Helen Shaw, The New Yorker, 5 Jan. 2024
  • In the world of online media, Mark Zuckerberg is a capricious king, able to boost or sink a publisher with a small tweak of Facebook’s code.
    — vanityfair.com, 24 Oct. 2017
  • The motions inside clouds are turbulent, with globs and eddies of gas swirling around like capricious fairies.
    — Nia Imara, Scientific American, 20 Feb. 2024
  • Garland’s prize if he were named FBI chief: a job that a capricious-seeming president could fire him from at any time.
    — David Weigel, Washington Post, 11 May 2017
  • This means Blackout can feel capricious and jarring in a way that other battle royale games don't.
    — Julie Muncy, Ars Technica, 19 Oct. 2018
  • The State Department has warned of the capricious and unpredictable nature of these policies.
    — George Calhoun, Forbes, 27 Sep. 2021
  • The sneaky stuff — the lack of home rule, the broken tax structure, the cruel and capricious education system — was left untouched.
    — al, 5 Dec. 2022
  • The motions inside clouds are turbulent, with globs and eddies of gas swirling around like capricious fairies.
    — Nia Imara, Scientific American, 1 Mar. 2024
  • The issue is that Trump has from the start run his affairs like a capricious monarch who likes to have a discordant range of conflicting advice.
    — Jeet Heer, The New Republic, 2 Apr. 2018

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'capricious.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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