Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Determined by, arising from, or marked by whim or caprice. See Synonyms at arbitrary.
- adj. Erratic in behavior or degree of unpredictability: a whimsical personality.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Full of whims; freakish; having odd fancies or peculiar notions; capricious.
- Odd; fantastic.
- Synonyms Singular, Odd, etc. (see eccentric), notional, crotchety.
- Fanciful, grotesque.
Wiktionary
- adj. Given to whimsy; capricious; odd; peculiar; playful; light-hearted or amusing.
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. Full of, or characterized by, whims; actuated by a whim; having peculiar notions; queer; strange; freakish.
- adj. Odd or fantastic in appearance; quaintly devised; fantastic.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. determined by chance or impulse or whim rather than by necessity or reason
Etymologies
- From whimsy + -ical. (Wiktionary)
- From whimsy. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“I feel Dustin would hate the word whimsical to describe anything he's written, but it's given me that sort of delight on a random Tuesday afternoon.”
“As we now know, thanks to his current trial on charges of paying for sex with a minor, he regularly assembles veritable harems of young women for bacchanals with a dress code that could be described as whimsical.”
“She titled the whimsical instructional, "Milk in bags, eh?”
“The sign that had once stood out front, Antiques—New and Old, was gone, as were the Nazi guards, who must have found the designation as whimsical as Private Hüber and his family did.”
“Its style might be well described as whimsical, its purpose is to amuse by means of playful fancies, and it usually exhibits”
Short Story Writing A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story
“Also, there is nothing that could possibly be called whimsical, nothing critical or self-critical, about him.”
“Nobody likes Micawber less for his follies; and Dickens liked his father more, the more he recalled his whimsical qualities.”
“Art is not dignified by being called whimsical -- or capricious.”
“Mr. Richard Watson Gilder, the editor, was away at the time, and I recall his whimsical horror when on his return he read the things I had said about a novel, which I, in the heat of youth, held to be entirely un-American.”
“They seem to regard the wayfaring Britisher as whimsical, that is all.”
East of Paris Sketches in the Gâtinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘whimsical’.
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GRE Barron's 800
zealot, wistful, welter, wary, whimsical, warranted, vortex, vivisection, volatile, vitiate, viscous, visage and 787 more...
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gre
municipal, whit, dissembler, berate, liberally, embellish, dissimilitude, histrionics, flamboyance, bombastic, bovine, calumny and 142 more...
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GRE 2014
abate, abdicate, abase, aberrant, abeyance, abhor, abjure, abortive, abound, abrasive, abreast, abridge and 1577 more...
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Words describing beauty
Words associated with beauty, love, and a happy feeling!
whimsical, amatory, amorous, paradisiacal, calliope, callitriche, Callimachus, callinectes, calliphora, seraphic, calliopsis, callirhoe and 27 more...
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Rococo
Words that describe the decadent Rococo art of the early 18th Century
Baroque, hedonistic, sensuality, pretty, elaborate, flirtation, chauvinistic, cupid, decorative, playful, vibrant, exuberant and 31 more...
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big book gre
abase, abbess, abbey, abbot, abdicate, abdomen, abdominal, abduction, abed, aberration, abet, abeyance and 6691 more...
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personality traits
Ways you can behave, think, or feel.
capricious, whimsical, pragmatic, quixotic, petulant, precocious, gregarious, meticulous, spartan, stoic, pious, stalwart
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MyList
peter out, fraying, jump on the bandw..., indignation, eclectic, hung up, salutary, hoary, warped, glaring, blue-collar, concomitant and 105 more...
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Twitter favourites
The new favourite words of people on Twitter.
A script searches Twitter for "X is my new favourite word" and adds it to this list.
See also:
thunderfuck, incredible, merp, sara, flopparoo, smother, fugly, buer, plum, canny, nefelibata, cuntbucket and 1972 more... -
Words
My list of words.
veritable, facetious, nadir, quixotic, apropos, acquiesce, ostensible, insipid, egregious, inveterate, coax, adroit and 409 more...
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Descriptive
The present, the future. Goals, wishes, hopes.
capricious, sericeous, sleek, flawless, charming, skilled, long-haired, versatile, beautiful, witty, fair, thin and 145 more...
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SAT Vocab
Redundant.
problematic, proclivity, prodigal, prodigious, prodigy, profane, profligate, profound, profusion, proliferation, prolific, prologue and 455 more...
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newGRE
mostly from magoosh
imbue, verge on, nonchalant, deliberate, timorous, futile, provisional, dissect, checked, tinged, alluring, visionary and 1046 more...
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Revised GRE Wordlist_2013
Vocabulary building for my quest of GRE 2013
ephemeral, esoteric, rhetoric, censure, egregious, pittance, dupe, mulct, paucity, alacrity, maintain, laconic and 997 more...
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Daily
Daily Vocab List
lull, pious, lurid, objurgate, insurgent, lewd, patio, onus, lampoon, geisha, larceny, maim and 206 more...
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NakedFringe's Words
masticate, chamber, orchid, mandolin, yellow, pomegranate, conundrum, paradox, gyrate, calamitous, opalescent, cacophony and 533 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for whimsical.

brtom Tell me, Constance, how do I look this evening? Is there anything whimsical about me? Is it one of my well-looking days, child? Am I in face to-day?
Goldsmith, She Stoops, I Jan 8, 2007