a. [f. FREAK sb.1 + -ISH.]
1. Full of freaks, characterized by freaks, capricious, whimsical.
1653. H. More, Conject. Cabbal. (1713), 186. But the face of the First Matter in Moses is horrid and dismal enough, without any such freakish conceits fetch’d from the misunderstanding of the Literal Cabbala, to make it bewray its own guilt and accessoriness to those evils that happen in the World.
1673. Wycherley, Gentl. Dancing-Master, I. i. If that cousin of mine were not an ill-contriv’d, ugly, freekish fool, in being my father’s choice I shou’d hate him.
1712. Steele, Spect., No. 514, 20 Oct., ¶ 4. She was continually varying her Dress, sometimes into the most natural and becoming Habits in the World, and at others into the most wild and freakish Garb that can be imagined.
1784. Cowper, Tiroc., 604.
| ’Tis not enough that Greek or Roman page, | |
| At stated hours, his freakish thoughts engage. |
1791. W. Bartram, Carolina, 249. We found the rest of our companions busily employed in securing the young freakish horses.
1812. W. Tennant, Anster F., I. viii.
| I see old Fairyland’s mirac’lous show, | |
| Her trees of tinsel kiss’d by freakish gales. |
1863. Geo. Eliot, Romola, I. iii. Look at that sketch: it is a fancy of Piero di Cosimo’s, a strange freakish painter, who says he saw it by long looking at a mouldy wall.
1870. Lowell, Study Wind. (1886), 40. A damp snow-storm often turns to rain, and, in our freakish climate, the wind will whisk sometimes into the northwest so suddenly as to plate all the trees with crystal before it has swept the sky clear of its last cobweb of cloud.
1875. Poste, Gaius, I. (ed. 2), 122. The synthesis of title and right in Civil law may be freakish and capricious, while that in Gentile law is reasonable and expedient; but both are equally positive institutions, and both are equally mutable and liable to be overruled.
2. Of the nature of a freak, curious, grotesque.
1805. Scott, Last Minstr., II. xi.
| Thou wouldst have thought some fairy’s hand | |
| ’Twixt poplars straight the osier wand | |
| In many a freakish knot had twined. |
1827. Hood, Mids. Fairies, lxxxviii.
| He, whilst his fellows griev’d, poor wight, had stuck | |
| His freakish gauds upon the Ancient’s brow. |
Hence Freakishly adv., Freakishness.
1678. Trans. Crt. Spain, 26. Let us admire the freakishness of worldly affairs.
a. 1714. J. Sharp, Wks. (1754), V. ii. 48. To do this is such a Piece of Folly and Freakishness, that if all of us should incline this way, it would presently render Mankind fitter for a Bethlehem, or an Hospital of Lunaticks, than to live in free Society.
1727. Bailey, vol. II., Freakishly.
1827. Scott, Jrnl., 27 April. I may be disabled from duty, but my tamed spirits and sense of dejection have quelled all that freakishness of humour which made me a voluntary idler.
1873. Symonds, Grk. Poets, vii. 204. With him [Euripides] the affairs of life are no longer based upon a firm foundation of Divine law, but gods intervene mechanically and freakishly, like the magicians in Ariosto or Tasso.
1888. Repentance P. Wentworth, II. 340. I suppose you, too, are highly indignant with me for embarrassing your friends, and are fully persuaded I did it out of sheer freakishness.
