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Definition
a person with an interest in an area, but without the knowledge or experience of a professionalIn the past, dilettante was also used to reference a person interested in the arts.
- my dilettantish efforts at painting
(Editor's note: Adding the suffix "-ish" means having the characteristics of. This is the same pattern you see in words like childish and foolish.)
- What is to me a means of livelihood is to him the merest hobby of a dilettante.Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan -- Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
- I really have no mind to turn into a dilettante spiritualist.Conrad, Joseph -- Under Western Eyes
- She might have drifted on, in her world of drifters, but for the interposition of Latham Ireland, the lawyer-dilettante lover.Sinclair Lewis -- Arrowsmith
- To give that number is the custom here: 'twas by a Dilettante written, And Dilettanti in the parts appear.Goethe (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) -- Faust
- He must be neither a dilettante nor a virtuoso: but he must be artistic.Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables
- I had no bent, I was a dilettante—and I realized it when I saw that my tutors were bored with me.Robert A. Heinlein -- Glory Road
- *" Then Leon, playing the dilettante, began to talk music.Gustave Flaubert -- Madame Bovary
- You were not meant to be measured in that way—you were meant for something better than to keep guard over the sensibilities of a sterile dilettante!Henry James -- The Portrait of a Lady - Volumes 1 & 2
- A dilettantism[496] in nature is barren and unworthy.Ralph Waldo Emerson -- Selected Essays
- "I thought I'd be a dilettante mother, but I'm as dismayingly natural as Mrs. Bogart," she boasted.Sinclair Lewis -- Main Street
- The cottage was far from that standard at present, for Lisbeth's rheumatism had forced her to give up her old habits of dilettante scouring and polishing.George Eliot -- Adam Bede
- Atkinson's a rich dilettante; he does what he's told, but he doesn't know why or by whom.Robert Ludlum -- The Bourne Ultimatum
- Nevertheless several accomplished alpinists not on her team regarded Pittman as a grandstanding dilettante.Jon Krakauer -- Into Thin Air
- David was no dilettante; he played the center of the court.Stephen King -- The Gunslinger
- Behind all its curiousness, so attractive alike to sage and dilettante, lie its dim dangers, throwing across us shadows at once grotesque and awful.W. E. B. Du Bois -- The Souls of Black Folk
- Bah! that is because you are dilettantish and amateurish.George Eliot -- Middlemarch
- All this admitted, Newman enjoyed his journey, when once he had fairly entered the current, as profoundly as the most zealous dilettante.Henry James -- The American
- You were not meant to be measured in that way—you were meant for something better than to keep guard over the sensibilities of a sterile dilettante!Henry James -- The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2
- And then you can go join the other artistic dilettantes and dropouts and mental cases that Sad King Billy collects on whatever Outback world he lives on.Dan Simmons -- Hyperion
(Editor's note: Adding the suffix "-ish" means having the characteristics of. This is the same pattern you see in words like childish and foolish.)