dilettante

“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

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

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

From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 5, 2025

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

What this means in practice is that all of us are Olympics dilettantes.

From Slate ● Feb. 8, 2018

Often portrayed in films as elitist dilettantes, they typically come off second best compared with hard-charging military officers or focused intelligence agents.

From Washington Post ● Jul. 20, 2017

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

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

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

From Time Magazine Archive

Whoever takes an interest in violin making will undoubtedly be pleased to hear more particulars in regard to dilettanti violin makers and their patrons.

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

But—for the first time—the idea of duty to be done found its way into these hearts, the beauty of self-sacrifice subdued these dilettanti.

From Underground Man by Gabriel Tarde