dilettante

Titus hands power to Saturninus, the eldest son of the late Roman emperor, played with a comic spin as a peevish dilettante by Matthew Amendt.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 1, 2026

"I like facts, I like knowledge, I like having wide interests. There's various ways of describing such a person, dilettante might be one way and polymath might be another."

From BBC ● Nov. 29, 2025

Crystal does fine in this environment; he doesn’t come off as a tourist or a dilettante.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 24, 2024

Kenner has described the hip-hop star as a naive amateur diplomat — a dilettante, not a criminal.

From Washington Post ● Mar. 31, 2023

Nevertheless, several accomplished alpinists not on her team regarded Pittman as a grandstanding dilettante.

From "Into Thin Air" by Jon Krakauer

Momoa is more introspective, careful never to imply that his friends in the sector — Dwayne Johnson, with Teremana Tequila, and Ryan Reynolds, with Aviation Gin — are dilettantes.

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 12, 2023

If anyone’s tempted to suggest that the place is filled with rich dilettantes, he noted that 36 percent of the people in this year’s entering class are eligible to receive Pell Grants for lower-income students.

From New York Times ● Aug. 20, 2022

Rabid Stranger Things fans, rabid Stranger Things dilettantes, and rabid Stranger Things newbies alike have a lot to look forward to, assuming they develop a cure for rabies before Stranger Things returns sometime in 2019.

From Slate ● Dec. 10, 2018

They got labelled as bandwagon-jumping dilettantes, a state of affairs not helped by their manager Tony Secunda’s penchant for headline-grabbing publicity stunts.

From The Guardian ● Nov. 8, 2016

‘There were no scientists in Stuart England,’ we are told, ‘and all the men we have grouped together under that heading were in their varying degrees dilettantes.’

From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton

Some of the finest early lithographs were by French dilettanti whose names have not transpired.

From Time Magazine Archive

This kind of heroic misinformation provoked some murmuring from English dilettanti who, arriving in Rome armed with nothing but their recollections of Piranesi's engravings, were disappointed by the city.

From Time Magazine Archive

The directors are just so many dilettanti who don't know their job.

From Time Magazine Archive

The Chinese books preferred by these humanistic dilettanti were those pertaining to rhetoric and poetry.

From An Introduction to the History of Japan by Katsuro Hara

He visited this country during the Exhibition of 1851, and was deeply gratified upon seeing so many high class instruments among the dilettanti here, and the taste and zest the English have in forming collections.

From Violins and Violin Makers Biographical Dictionary of the Great Italian Artistes, their Followers and Imitators, to the present time. With Essays on Important Subjects Connected with the Violin. by J. H. (Joseph Henry) Pearce