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

A dilettante prone to colorful tangents, he sees Molly as an object of fascination and a personal cause.

From New York Times ● May 29, 2024

After a hit-and-run accident, three people — a servant, a dilettante and a journalist — find their lives tangled up in the crime’s mysterious origins and aftermath.

From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 29, 2022

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

From "Into Thin Air" by Jon Krakauer

Him and all the other dilettantes who don’t know the wonders of VistaVision.

From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 5, 2025

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

She and Steven Weber play Debbie and Stew Klein, a couple of boomer dilettantes who crash their kid’s married life with the news that they’re in debt.

From New York Times ● Feb. 5, 2020

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

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

But perhaps it was somewhat early to start a concert, and the dilettanti, awakened inopportunely, would not, perhaps, pay him in current coin of the realm.

From Round the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne

Joseph Clemens, the first of these, was himself a composer, after the usual fashion of royal dilettanti, no doubt, but a keen discerner of talent in others.

From Beethoven: A Memoir (2nd Ed.) by Elliott Graeme