Adjective: arbitrary
Comparison Forms
Synthetic
Perifrastic
| Comparative | more arbitrary |
| Superlative | most arbitrary |
Sample Sentences
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Benjamin Franklin's designation of "positive" and "negative" to different charges was arbitrary.
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The decision to use 18 years as the legal age of adulthood was arbitrary, as both age 17 and 19 were reasonable alternatives.
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1937/1938, Albert Einstein, letter to Max Born
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The Russian trials were Stalin's purges, with which he attempted to consolidate his power. Like most people in the West, I believed these show trials to be the arbitrary acts of a cruel dictator.
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The bromide conforms to everything sanctioned by the majority, and may be depended upon to be trite, banal, and arbitrary. [1906, Gelett Burgess, Are You a Bromide?:]
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The equation is true for an arbitrary value of x.
Adjectives inflected like arbitrary
priest-ridden,
unreposed,
evadible,
dissentious,
dissentient,
unforesighted,
egocentrical,
unephemeral,
unennobling,
mensuralist,
flocculent,
unseductive,
whoopsy,
whooshy,
surrogate,
Nicodian,
unrepaired,
prismatoidal,
renorenal,
unseducible, etc. (List truncated at 20 adjectives)
Etymology
1. Etymology tree
2. Latin arbiter
3. Proto-Indo-European *-yósder.
4. Proto-Italic *-āzios
5. Latin -ārius
6. Latin arbitrāriusder.
7. Middle English arbitrarie
8. English arbitrary
9. From Middle English arbitrarie, Latin arbitrārius (“arbitrary, uncertain”), from arbiter (“witness, on-looker, listener, judge, overseer”). See: Latin Adjectives '
arbitrārius'.