ARBITRARY in a Sentence

Learn ARBITRARY from example sentences, some of them are from classic books. These examples are selected from a corpus with 300,000 sentences, including classic works and current mainstream media. Some sentences also link to their contexts.

For ARBITRARY, below is one of 17 sentences:
Thirdly, Despotical power is an absolute, arbitrary power one man has over another, to take away his life, whenever he pleases.

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 Meanings and Examples of ARBITRARY
Definition Example Sentence Classic Sentence
arbitrary
 a.  randomly chosen; determined by chance or impulse, and not by reason or principle
Classic Sentence:
1  The movement of humanity, arising as it does from innumerable arbitrary human wills, is continuous.
War and Peace 4 By Leo Tolstoy
Context  Highlight   In BOOK 11: CHAPTER I
2  But to arrive at these laws, resulting from the sum of all those human wills, man's mind postulates arbitrary and disconnected units.
War and Peace 4 By Leo Tolstoy
Context  Highlight   In BOOK 11: CHAPTER I
3  And the farther we go back in examining events the less arbitrary do they appear.
War and Peace 6 By Leo Tolstoy
Context  Highlight   In BOOK 17: CHAPTER IX
4  And while their manners were thus the subject of sarcastic observation, the untaught Saxons unwittingly transgressed several of the arbitrary rules established for the regulation of society.
Ivanhoe By Walter Scott
Context  Highlight   In CHAPTER XIV
5  If it is a purely arbitrary one, it may be impossible for us to solve it.
The Return of Sherlock Holmes By Arthur Conan Doyle
Context  Highlight   In III. THE ADVENTURE OF THE DANCING MEN
6  He is a seemingly arbitrary man, but this is because he knows what he is talking about better than any one else.
Dracula By Bram Stoker
Context  Highlight   In CHAPTER IX
7  And yet she's firmly persuaded that I'm an arbitrary overbearing bossing kind of person.
Pygmalion By George Bernard Shaw
Context  Highlight   In ACT II
8  And should this happen, she had no legal rights, no legal redress, except those same drumhead courts of which Tony had spoken so bitterly, those military courts with their arbitrary powers.
Gone With The Wind By Margaret Mitche
Context  Highlight   In CHAPTER XXXVII
9  Thirdly, Despotical power is an absolute, arbitrary power one man has over another, to take away his life, whenever he pleases.
Second Treatise of Government By John Locke
Context  Highlight   In CHAPTER XV
10  Nicholas, though he had never seen Ilagin, with his usual absence of moderation in judgment, hated him cordially from reports of his arbitrariness and violence, and regarded him as his bitterest foe.
War and Peace 3 By Leo Tolstoy
Context  Highlight   In BOOK 7: CHAPTER VI
Example Sentence:
1  Patriotism is a arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.
2  You can make an arbitrary choice.
3  The choice of players for the team seemed completely arbitrary.
4  Neighborhood distinctions are arbitrary and often straddle zip codes.
5  He threw an arbitrary assortment of clothes into his suitcase and headed off, not caring where he went.
6  Its curves are arbitrary, and what we call accidental, but one after another follows it as if he were guided by a chart on which it was laid down.
7  The bridge is where hundreds of peaceful protesters were brutally beaten on "Bloody Sunday" as they sought to end discriminatory tactics — such as poll taxes and arbitrary literacy tests — used by white officials to prevent African Americans from voting.