vagary
/vəˈɡɛɚ.i/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.17 in modern English
13
Scrabble Score
6
Letters
3
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
An erratic, unpredictable occurrence or action.
Example Sentences
- "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, continually oozing up beneath the pressure of the strata above it."
- "This searching was facilitated by the author's knowledge of the vagaries of Anglo-Indian spelling and the numerous colonial-era transliteration systems used for loanwords from Indian languages."
- "These systems learn the vagaries of language by analyzing enormous amounts of text, including thousands of books, Wikipedia entries and other online documents."
- "to speak in vagaries"
- "And then came the day when my socialism grew respectable,—still a vagary of youth, it was held, but romantically respectable."
Etymology
From Italian vagare (“wander”) and/or its source Latin vagārī (“to wander”), from Latin vagus (“wandering”). Later apparently reinterpreted in English as vague + -ery but without changing the spelling. By surface analysis, Latin vag(us) + -ary.