Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Flighty \Flight"y\, a.
-
Fleeting; swift; transient.
The flighty purpose never is o'ertook, Unless the deed go with it.
--Shak. -
Indulging in flights, or wild and unrestrained sallies, of imagination, humor, caprice, etc.; given to disordered fancies and extravagant conduct; volatile; giddy; eccentric; slighty delirious.
Proofs of my flighty and paradoxical turn of mind.
--Coleridge.A harsh disciplinarian and a flighty enthusiast.
--J. S. Harford.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1550s, "swift," from flight (n.1) + -y (2). Sense of "fickle or frivolous" is from 1768, perhaps from notion of "given to 'flights' of imagination." Related: Flightiness.
Wiktionary
a. Given to unplanned and silly ideas or actions.
WordNet
adj. irresponsibly frivolous; "flighty young girls" [syn: flyaway]
absent-mindedly irresponsible; "he said I was too flighty to be a good supervisor" [syn: head-in-the-clouds, scatterbrained]
[also: flightiest, flightier]
Usage examples of "flighty".
Maggie should have taken solace in the fact that her sister was flighty and had, in the past, disappeared for a few days.
George-Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, was in one of his flighty moods and yawned ostentatiously as Arlington silently read the document through twice.
He had no wish to see Vaux dead, and buckhurst was flighty enough to kill him for the fun of it.
As for Madame Deberle she was most estimable, in spite of her somewhat flighty ways, which were doubtless due to her Parisian education.
Quite an intelligent young lady, and not at all flighty unless I miss my guess.
The penultimate rider was Hilary Frampton riding Pegasus, a flighty chestnut thoroughbred who had performed magnificently in the first round.
Nastasya Filippovna cried, making a wry and displeased face, like a flighty, foolish little girl whose toy is being taken away.
In the years to come he did not ever see that his patience and forbearance in the matter of his flighty, labile wife were all the evidence of love he actually needed.
The Klingons were dangerous, but distressingly repetitious, and the Andorians too flighty for a real contest.
Agnes du Salm had promised to look after her, but Agnes was flighty and never lacked for escorts while her husband was away.
Raif found himself wishing he were on Moose, not some flighty filly borrowed from Longhead at the last moment.
Some of the pond's flightier ducks have already decamped for points south, and more leave on some phylogenic cue just as the shiny trucks pull up, but the main herd remains.
Meade and the other dowagers who had been so cool to her during the last days of the war, forgot her flighty conduct and their disapproval of it and recalled only that she had suffered in their common defeat and that she was Pitty’s niece and Charles’ widow.
The wealth of the whole of London seemed to be floating down towards the Easterlies in a glittering, prismatic rain of borrowed scarves, pocketed fruit, dropped fob watches, flighty fans and fine ebony canes.
He'd always thought horses were too flighty as well as needing an expensive diet of grain, while oxen got along fine on grass and coarse fodder.