Flighty means changeable and not to be relied on. A flighty temperament, flighty and forgetful, a flighty horse.
It is applied to women far more than to men, which is worth noticing before using it. Of a horse it is neutral and technical and means easily startled, and that is probably the older sense the human one grew out of.
1adjectiveflightyChangeable and not to be relied on.
“She was too flighty to stay in one job for more than a few months.”
flighty is a quality.
FLIGHTy → ready to FLY off at any moment
Quick to fly off after the next new thing, and nothing at all holds her.
hooks ontofly
Flight plus -y. The idea is of something ready to take flight at any moment.
Middle English
flight
English
flight
English, today
flighty
Built from
From flight + y. Compare Dutch vluchtig (“volatile; fleeting; cursory”), German flüchtig (“volatile; fleeting; momentary; quick”), Danish flygtig (“elusive; evasive”), Swedish flyktig. flight comes from Middle English flight. From Middle English flight, from Old English flyht (“flight”), from Proto-West Germanic fluhti (“flight”), derived from fleuganą (“to fly”), from Proto-Indo-European plewk- (“to fly”), enlargement of plew- (“flow”). Analyzable as fly + t (variant of -th). Cognate with West Frisian flecht (“flight”), Dutch vlucht (“flight”), German Flucht (“flight”) (etymology 2).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA