Word.ws English Dictionary

vagarian

vagarian noun: one with ridiculous or whimsical ideas; a crackpot.

Noun

vagarian (plural vagarians)

  1. One with ridiculous or whimsical ideas; a crackpot.
    • Why, it was but yesterday that the mariner's compass was discovered, that printing was shown to be practicable, that steam power was laughed at as an absurdity, and the electric telegraph ridiculed as the hobby of a vagarian's brain.1858, Alexander Campbell, Charles Louis Loos, The Millennial Harbinger, page 335
    • It has produced superstitious enthusiasts, harebrained vagarians, who have brought the most sacred things into contempt.1907, The Methodist Review Quarterly - Volume 56, page 715

Examples of vagarian in a sentence

  • But charlatans and vagarians never cease to appropriate scientific terms for their pseudologies.1928, Arvid Reuterdahl, The God of science, page 220:
  • There were other vagarians, writers of imaginary voyages who sought to impose on a public eager for a new sensation, and still they come with books which are taken seriously by the unthinking.1936, Charles Joseph Finger, Valiant Vagabonds, page 60:
  • I suppose that the obvious facts are always giving us vagarians the slip, like our old family cow, unless we follow them up sharply through flood or fire.1980, William Dean Howells, George Warren Arms, Selected letters - Volume 4; Volume 19, page 190:

Forms of vagarian

pluralvagarians

Origin of vagarian

From vagary + -ian. By surface analysis, Latin vag(us) + -arian.

Questions about vagarian

What does vagarian mean?
Vagarian means one with ridiculous or whimsical ideas; a crackpot.
How do you use vagarian in a sentence?
But charlatans and vagarians never cease to appropriate scientific terms for their pseudologies.
What part of speech is vagarian?
Vagarian is a noun.
What is the plural of vagarian?
The plural of vagarian is vagarians.

Words near vagarian in the dictionary

  1. vagal
  2. vagally
  3. vagancies
  4. vagancy
  5. Vaganova method
  6. vagarian
  7. vagarians
  8. vagaries
  9. vagarious
  10. vagariously
  11. vagarish

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: vagarian (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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