Definition of vacillate in English:

intransitive verb

• Alternate or waver between different opinions or actions; be indecisive.

  ‘I had for a time vacillated between teaching and journalism’

  More example sentences

  • ‘Since the time of his death informed opinion has vacillated between near universal confidence in his guilt and passionate attempts to exonerate him.’
  • ‘However, years of indecisiveness have left the company vacillating between a differentiation strategy and that of being a cost leader.’
  • ‘Ask her for an opinion, and she'll give it to you without any hesitation or attempts to vacillate.’
  • ‘Certainly, public opinion of the royals has vacillated so much over the past couple of decades that anything is possible.’
  • ‘He has vacillated between contradictory approaches to leadership: realism and idealism.’
  • ‘The government should give leadership, and not procrastinate and vacillate, he said, although he recognised it could take 20 years.’
  • ‘That's partly because the party's candidates have come across as vacillating on military issues and lenient on social concerns like crime and federal ‘giveaways’ to the poor.’
  • ‘I don't know, I keep vacillating on whether I should practice so I could make a point in a very humorous way, or whether I should just stay off it.’
  • ‘It's difficult to say, but indeed I am vacillating between the two.’
  • ‘Stay firm with decisions at work and don't keep vacillating.’
  • ‘Well, I usually, keep on vacillating between being a hardcore realist and a hopeless romantic.’
  • ‘The president vacillates between the two (hard-line and moderate) camps.’
  • ‘‘The nation's top law enforcer cannot be someone who vacillates between civil rights and Civil War fantasies,’ Jackson wrote.’
  • ‘He vacillates between childlike bemusement and childlike trepidation.’
  • ‘Its programming vacillates between easily recognized art house fare and mainstream movies, giving the impression that it doesn't really know what it wants to be.’
  • ‘He vacillated when he was asked the direct question at an Irish press conference about the Sunderland job and immediately established in some people's minds the belief that he was actively looking for another job.’
  • ‘In his later comments on the Marx Brothers, he vacillated between generosity and steely contempt.’
  • ‘The first week or two I vacillated, like most people, between sadness and anger.’
  • ‘My children bring me great joy (especially as the little ones vacillate between squirming with curiosity and tittering with barely kept secrets in anticipation of Christmas).’
  • ‘My listening tastes vacillate between music and talk radio.’

  Synonyms

  dither, be indecisive, be irresolute, be undecided, be uncertain, be unsure, be doubtful, waver, teeter, temporize, hesitate, oscillate, fluctuate, keep changing one's mind

  irresolute, hesitant, tentative, dithering, wavering, teetering, fluctuating, ambivalent, divided, doubtful, unsure, uncertain, in two minds, undecided, indefinite, unresolved, undetermined

  View synonyms