as in romantic
having or marked by a tendency to be guided more by ideals than by reality
a quixotical attempt to bring live theater to a generation hooked on video games
Synonyms & Similar Words
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Antonyms & Near Antonyms
Example Sentences
Recent Examples of Synonyms for quixotical
Adjective
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Across age groups, people are leaning on AI for emotional support, companionship and in some cases, romantic connections.—
Samantha Subin,
CNBC,
14 Oct. 2025 -
With a collaborative relationship dating back to 2023, Crocs and Simone Rocha have attracted attention with their romantic clog styles in the past few years, gaining stamps of approval from celebrities like Julia Fox and Michelle Yeoh.—
Jaden Thompson,
Footwear News,
14 Oct. 2025
Adjective
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But as someone who lives in an NYC apartment and doesn’t have the worries of car ownership or a pet to clean up after, the machine felt bulky and impractical for my lifestyle.—
Nashia Baker,
Architectural Digest,
7 Oct. 2025
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The girls are wearing heeled white dance shoes that are defiantly impractical for the city streets, in striking contrast to the robust sneakers that everyone else has on.—
Rebecca Mead,
New Yorker,
5 Oct. 2025
Adjective
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Many of Herzog’s films capture that sense of a quixotic, even bizarre quest, an antihero searching for some kind of truth that may be obvious only to himself.—
Nick Lichtenberg,
Fortune,
28 Sep. 2025
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His performance here most recalls his tragicomic portrayal of John Brown, the heroic but unhinged abolitionist whose quixotic raid on Harpers Ferry helped catalyze the Civil War, in Showtime’s 2020 adaptation of James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird.—
Judy Berman,
Time,
23 Sep. 2025
Adjective
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For more than a century, people have wondered if the city is ungovernable; with the exception of Fiorello La Guardia, who had New Deal money raining down on him, every idealistic leader who has been elected mayor has left City Hall in some way battered by it.—
Eric Lach,
New Yorker,
9 Oct. 2025
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The trend for the last twenty years is for a Balkanized internet—not the idealistic worldwide web, but local internet without much access to the outside.—
Richard Stengel,
Time,
1 Oct. 2025
Adjective
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France has been mired in crisis as a series of minority governments struggle to pass deficit-reduction measures through a truculent parliament, split between three ideological blocs.—
CNN Money,
CNN Money,
12 Oct. 2025
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In certain ideological precincts, Mamdani’s name has become totemic—shorthand for everything wrong with New York, which itself is shorthand for everything wrong with America.—
Eric Lach,
New Yorker,
9 Oct. 2025
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Cite this Entry
“Quixotical.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/quixotical. Accessed 16 Oct. 2025.
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