capriciousness

1. 1.

   the quality of being guided by sudden unpredictable impulses

   Synonymsunpredictability

   Broaderinconstancy
2. 2.

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

   “I despair at the flightiness and whimsicality of my memory”

   Synonymsflightinessarbitrarinesswhimsicalitywhimsywhimsey

   Broaderirresponsibility

Other forms of capriciousness

plural

capriciousnesses·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about capriciousness

What does capriciousness mean?

capriciousness means "the quality of being guided by sudden unpredictable impulses". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in capriciousness?

capriciousness has 5 syllables: ca-pri-ci-ou-sness. The stress falls on "ci".

What is another word for capriciousness?

Close synonyms include unpredictability, flightiness, arbitrariness, whimsicality, whimsy. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is capriciousness a common word?

capriciousness is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.