(a.) Depending on will or discretion; not governed by any fixed rules; as, an arbitrary decision; an arbitrary punishment.
(a.) Exercised according to one's own will or caprice, and therefore conveying a notion of a tendency to abuse the possession of power.
(a.) Despotic; absolute in power; bound by no law; harsh and unforbearing; tyrannical; as, an arbitrary prince or government.
Example Sentences:
(1) This developed concept of "valve only" energy loss has the potential of standardising the findings of different research groups by removing the arbitrary selection of measurement points from reported results.
(2) 'Vertical' sections are plane sections longitudinal to a fixed (but arbitrary) axial direction.
(3) In the microtitre plate assay only 45% of specific IgE was immobilized and it was necessary to express the results in arbitrary units.
(4) It is concluded that renin levels in hypertension are influenced by several factors and that any attempt to subdivide patients into renin subgroups is therefore arbitrary.
(5) In his letter Abd El Fattah highlights the arbitrary nature of many of their detentions, the torture to which thousands have probably been subjected – and the apathy towards, and often enthusiasm for, such malpractice among the public.
(6) Although the diagnosis of hyperlipidemia is somewhat arbitrary, in that the upper limits of normal are not universally agreed upon, it is clear that the risk of atherosclerosis increases with plasma cholesterol concentration; it may also increase in hyperglyceridemia.
(7) Several arbitrary definitions have been used, some related to visual estimates of coronary stenosis and others to quantitative angiographic techniques.
(8) More than 60% of the residents' working hours in this program exceeded the arbitrary 80-hour limit, emphasizing the challenge of complying with the imposition of maximum work hours.
(9) Practically, serially accumulated images with sequentially prolonged accumulation times are weighted by two arbitrary functions.
(10) While somewhat arbitrary, the number of drug-affected newborns, adjusted for underreporting, was about 38,000 (95% confidence interval: 30,000-45,000).
(11) The almost-Orwellian technology that enables the government to store and analyze the phone metadata of every telephone user in the United States is unlike anything that could have been conceived in 1979 [...] I cannot imagine a more "indiscriminate" and "arbitrary invasion" than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval.
(12) For the chain with arbitrary values of characteristic times of individual stages the maximal possible degree of the chain stability and corresponding value of the feedback coefficient are estimated.
(13) The cellular total polyamine (spermidine + spermine) concentration on the slides varied between 4 and 15 nmol per mg protein (MCF-7 cells) and 5 and 26 nmol per mg protein (HeLa cells) and the corresponding microfluorometric results between 60 and 115 arbitrary units (MCF-7 cells) and 80 and 160 arbitrary units (HeLa cells).
(14) A general purpose computer program, PROPAGATE, has been written to allow addition, deletion, and modification of the beam line elements used in the calculation and to provide a convenient means of repeating such calculations for arbitrary beam lines.
(15) The current government should learn from past mistakes and not expand the programme too quickly in pursuit of arbitrary targets, and, above all else, not overclaim for free schools.
(16) The device consists of a motor-driven shaft which moves the record past a fixed cursor, and an electronic counter which records the movements of the shaft, thereby providing a cumulative tally of the distance of the current position of the cursor from some arbitrary origin on the record.
(17) Analysis of total radioligand binding was found to be a better procedure because it eliminates the use of an arbitrary concentration of unlabelled ligand and improves the accuracy of the assay.
(18) Water ferns (Salviniaceae) and seed ferns (Pteridospermae) are known as the arbitrary type of Lycopsida which did not reach the state of shot structure of the body.
(19) Methods are reviewed for estimating the transverse relaxation time T2 and the pseudodensity (PD) from spin-echo measurements acquired at an arbitrary set of echo times [TEi].
(20) The response of the resting (fully formed) hair follicle to irradiation was studied using an arbitrary 6 unit scale of epilation as an endpoint.
Subterfuge
Definition:
(n.) That to which one resorts for escape or concealment; an artifice employed to escape censure or the force of an argument, or to justify opinions or conduct; a shift; an evasion.
Example Sentences:
(1) Such a coalition could break through the inertia and subterfuge now deadlocking the negotiations.
(2) "It is LSE's view that the students were not given enough information to enable informed consent, yet were given enough to put them in serious danger if the subterfuge had been uncovered prior to their departure from North Korea," the university said in an email sent to all staff and students on Saturday.
(3) In my own new novel I hope to contribute in some small way to the subterfuges of what may be England's most secretive literary county.
(4) In Paris, Cahun had played a major part in Georges Bataille 's Contre-Attaque resistance group, and in Jersey she soon instigated an outrageous – not to mention dangerous – game of subterfuge, producing fake letters and tracts advertising unrest among the occupying forces.
(5) Supporters of Cable were also looking to see if they have a case to take the Daily Telegraph to the police or Press Complaints Commission for using false names, addresses and subterfuge to inveigle Liberal Democrat ministers into expressing doubts about some coalition policies.
(6) At a dinner I attended in Krakow, a Polish woman in her 30s said she believed the Smolensk crash to be a tragic accident caused by human error, not divine intervention – a lack of judgment not Russian subterfuge.
(7) But such subterfuges do little to hide a crude reality that Eritreans who have fled are desperate to describe.
(8) The magazine editor also defended the use of subterfuge by media organisations.
(9) Under the terms of the Ipso code the Sunday Mirror has 28 days to respond to the complaint and is expected to argue that the subterfuge used is justified by the public interest in exposing Newmark.
(10) Factitious hypoglycemia, on the other hand, results from deliberate subterfuge by the patient and may thus elude proper diagnosis for some time.
(11) Allardyce is a man who, as the recordings obtained by subterfuge show , can be lured by promises of cash into making unguarded jibes about his peers and colleagues.
(12) In sometimes choosing not to answer simple questions, Cookson has been criticised as a career politician when he strives to be a genuine cycling man who shares the overwhelming distaste for corruption and subterfuge.
(13) The talks – which ended in disarray after the US, working with a small group of 25 countries, tried to ram through an agreement that other developing countries mostly rejected – were marked by subterfuge, passion and chaos.
(14) Proud to be a "provincial" writer, in his novel Kept (2006) Taylor begins with a bravura passage describing his home county: "A land of winding backroads and creaking carts and windmills, a land of flood, and eels and elvers and all that comes from water, a land of silence and subterfuge, of things not said but only whispered, where much is kept secret which would be better laid open to scrutiny."
(15) In Kim, people die rather casually; engage in deceit and subterfuge, and tell each other fabulous stories.
(16) Simon Ringrose, specialist prosecutor in the CPS’s Special Crime Division, said: “Mr Mahmood portrayed himself as the master of subterfuge and as the ‘King of the Sting’, but on this occasion it is he and Mr Smith who have been exposed.
(17) Beyond this, there was the oddity that the subterfuge-laden missive originally emerged in the Uxbridge constituency office of Mr Mitchell's deputy, John Randall, which made it doubly destabilising.
(18) The Labour party was furious with the Tories because it believes their opponents, whose general election campaign is being run by the controversial Australian Lynton Crosby, stepped over an unofficial mark to embark on subterfuge and entrapment.
(19) The 36-year-old, who held the position of managing director at Leeds until April, has not been charged with a criminal offence and denies all the allegations against him, saying he may have been lured to Dubai through “subterfuge”.
(20) But the party felt that using material obtained by subterfuge from "students" was unacceptable.