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

Kenner has described the hip-hop star as a naive amateur diplomat — a dilettante, not a criminal.

From Washington Post ● Mar. 31, 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

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

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

From Slate ● Aug. 28, 2019

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

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

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

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

From Time Magazine Archive

They were musical dilettanti, who commonly assembled at Serlo's once a week, and formed a little concert.

From Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Travels, Vol. I (of 2) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Davide," wrote a French critic, M. Bertin, from Venice, in 1823, "excites among the dilettanti of this town an enthusiasm and delight which could scarcely be conceived without having been witnessed.

From The Great Musicians: Rossini and His School by Henry Sutherland Edwards