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dilettante

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




Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

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“I’m not coming at this like some kind of social dilettante billionaire who thinks he’s God’s gift,” he said.

From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 19, 2026

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

But he is also a deeply polarizing character, mocked by some critics as a dilettante or sound bite philosopher.

From New York Times ● Feb. 28, 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

In a backslapping musical world of insipid dilettantes, Mark and his music stand for absolute conviction, absolute meaning and the absolute refusal to compromise your vision.

From The Guardian ● Feb. 26, 2019

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

‘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

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

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

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

It is too favourite an opinion, both with dilettanti and artists, that the new style must invariably be the most beautiful; permitting fashion even to corrupt the arts.

From The History of Painting in Italy, Vol. IV (of 6) from the Period of the Revival of the Fine Arts to the End of the Eighteenth Century by Luigi Antonio Lanzi




Vocabulary lists containing dilettante


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