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

And he has often been underestimated, such as when he won a majority government in 2015 at the age of 44, despite being portrayed by his political opponents as something of a dilettante.

From BBC ● Dec. 21, 2024

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

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 24, 2024

Growing up, the conductor Maxime Pascal was a self-identified musical dilettante.

From New York Times ● Aug. 16, 2023

Charles wasn’t a dilettante; he was serious about the breeding and created his own new lines of pigeons.

From "Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith" by Deborah Heiligman

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

Today, however, people engaged in the serious craft of politics are understandably uninterested in the work of dilettantes who dabble at politics to the detriment of their vocation.

From Washington Post ● Sep. 7, 2022

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

Celebrity activists have long been written off as self-important dilettantes.

From Slate ● Aug. 28, 2019

Ben thought of Charlie and Jamie less as professional money managers than as dilettantes or, as he put it, “a couple of smart guys just punting around in the markets.”

From "The Big Short" by Michael Lewis

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

From Time Magazine Archive

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

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

Many dilettanti are presumptuous enough to believe themselves further advanced in theoretical knowledge concerning tone than the most experienced violin maker of the present day.

From George Gem?nder's Progress in Violin Making With Interesting Facts Concerning the Art and Its Critics in General by Gem?nder, George

Mr. Spurgeon has an utter contempt for scientific charlatans and literary dilettanti, and all that class of men who have no higher business in life than to carp and criticise.

From From the Lakes of Killarney to the Golden Horn by Field, Henry M. (Henry Martyn)