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dilettante

[dil-i-tahnt, dil-i-tahnt, -tahn-tey, -tan-tee] / ˈdɪl ɪˌtɑnt, ˌdɪl ɪˈtɑnt, -ˈtɑn teɪ, -ˈtæn ti /




Example Sentences

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Others see a dilettante who benefited from family money as he moved through his 20s and 30s, all while creating a cache of disquieting social-media posts that have become fodder for his opponents.

From The Wall Street Journal Jun. 6, 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

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

From New York Times Aug. 16, 2023

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

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

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

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

From Time Magazine Archive

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

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 George Gem?nder

Mrs. Humphrey was seldom seen, being in poor health almost constantly, but their only daughter, Jennie, was one of the foremost of the fashionable of the dilettanti of the city.

From Mississippi Outlaws and the Detectives Don Pedro and the Detectives; Poisoner and the Detectives by Allan Pinkerton




Vocabulary lists containing dilettante


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