How to Use arbitrary in a Sentence

arbitrary

adjective

• An arbitrary number has been assigned to each district.
• Although arbitrary arrests are illegal, they continue to occur in many parts of the country.
• I don't know why I chose that one; it was a completely arbitrary decision.
• But some engineers who didn’t receive the shares were irked and said the selection process was arbitrary.
  — Elvia Limón, Los Angeles Times, 30 Dec. 2021
• Supporters of the two men called for their release, saying their arrests were arbitrary.
  — Chao Deng, WSJ, 19 Jan. 2022
• The law must be reasonable and must guarantee against arbitrary state action.
  — Manavi Kapur, Quartz, 21 Dec. 2021
• Their lives are governed by repetitive schedules and a series of arbitrary commands.
  — Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic, 30 Dec. 2021
• The bonus program has irked some engineers who didn’t receive the shares and believe the selection process is arbitrary.
  — Mark Gurman, Fortune, 29 Dec. 2021
• The 10 percent trigger for a correction is an arbitrary, round-number threshold.
  — New York Times, 25 Jan. 2022
• These nodes form networks of connections, akin to the brain’s natural neural synapses, which can be made stronger or weaker through training on any arbitrary dataset.
  — Lee Billings, Scientific American, 8 Oct. 2024
• The stat has become a bit of a gimmick, with a lot of focus pointed directly at guys who achieve big arbitrary round numbers in multiple categories.
  — Morten Jensen, Forbes, 27 Jan. 2022
• Doctors and pharmacists told ABC News the process of obtaining the drug is opaque, even arbitrary.
  — Anne Flaherty, ABC News, 29 Jan. 2022
• This turn felt at once arbitrary and revealing: increasingly, the company seemed to be losing interest in the musicians themselves.
  — Alex Barasch, The New Yorker, 7 Oct. 2024
• While sudden incidents wrest the plot in new directions, the film is driven less by perverse narrative trickery than by the arbitrary cruelty of fate or the volatility of human nature.
  — Guy Lodge, Variety, 26 Sep. 2024
• Human rights groups say arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances and summary executions became the hallmark of the regime.
  — Abdoulie John, ajc, 25 Dec. 2021
• The title, like so much else in the book, seems arbitrary.
  — Paul Elie, The New Yorker, 19 Aug. 2019
• Of course, your choice doesn’t have to be so arbitrary.
  — Alisha McDarris, Popular Science, 13 Jan. 2020
• And that arbitrary bit of division isn’t the end of it.
  — Andrew Van Dam, Washington Post, 11 Aug. 2023
• Because the shooting was arbitrary and up and down the street.
  — Meredith Deliso, ABC News, 16 May 2023
• But the way in which many of them use these numbers is arbitrary.
  — Kaitlyn Tiffany, The Atlantic, 17 Jan. 2023
• The record, whether carved in stone or bits of data, is arbitrary in the extreme.
  — Virginia Heffernan, WIRED, 20 Aug. 2019
• Here's what else gives me pause: The meal plan is arbitrary: Just look at the portion sizes.
  — Jaclyn London, Ms, Rd, Cdn, Good Housekeeping, 11 Dec. 2018
• The $15 charge was set, not for what people could pay, but for the need to raise the arbitrary $1 billion goal.
  — Lucius Riccio, New York Daily News, 9 June 2024
• And that method is both somewhat arbitrary and hard to scale up.
  — Jeremy Kahn, Fortune, 8 Feb. 2022
• That was the way to get through grief: make each moment hard with arbitrary want, then hop on them like rocks to get across the day.
  — Kate Osana Simonian, chicagotribune.com, 10 June 2017
• To critics, the list is arbitrary, vague and amounts to picking winners and losers.
  — Tory Newmyer, Washington Post, 9 Mar. 2018
• Each of the solid rounds is 82 tons, which is not an arbitrary number.
  — Mark Jenkins, Washington Post, 1 July 2022
• The heavy-handed and arbitrary way in which it was done in Shanghai backfired.
  — Robert Mahoney, CNN, 26 Apr. 2022
• But this is a highly arbitrary process, and marginalized people can slip through the cracks.
  — Alvin Chang, Vox, 26 July 2018
• The athletes call that arbitrary punishment for having dared to walk away from the team.
  — Vivienne Walt, Time, 8 July 2021

Last Updated: 4 Nov 2024