dilettante

American  

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

noun

• dilettantes,
  plural
• dilettanti
  plural

1. a person who takes up an art, activity, or subject merely for amusement, especially in a desultory or superficial way; dabbler.

   Synonyms:

   amateur

2. a lover of an art or science, especially of a fine art.

---

adjective

1. of or relating to dilettantes.

dilettante British  

/ ˌdɪlɪˈtɑːntɪ /

noun

1. a person whose interest in a subject is superficial rather than professional

2. a person who loves the arts

---

adjective

1. of or characteristic of a dilettante

dilettante Cultural  

1. Someone who is interested in the fine arts as a spectator, not as a serious practitioner. Dilettante is most often used to mean a dabbler, someone with a broad but shallow attachment to any field.

---

Other Word Forms

Derived Forms

• dilettantism
  noun
• dilettanteish
  adjective
• dilettantish
  adjective

Inflected Forms

Nouns

• dilettantes
  plural
• dilettanti
  plural

Etymology

Origin of dilettante

1725–35; < Italian, noun use of present participle of dilettare < Latin dēlectāre to delight

Explanation

Though dilettante might sound like a nice French word, don't use it on your friend who thinks he can play the guitar after several short lessons. A dilettante is an amateur, often one who pretends to be very knowledgeable. The meaning of dilettante has changed since it was borrowed from the Italian in the mid 1700s. Originally, it meant "lover of the arts," but began to take on a negative slant as the idea of doing something as a professional took hold strongly during the 18th century. A dilettante was a mere lover of art as opposed to one who did it professionally. Today, the word implies you're pretending to be more of an artist than you're interested in or capable of being, so if you call your friend who likes to paint a dilettante, it's like you're calling him or her a poser.

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

dilettante dilettantes dilettanti

The reason for its omission, one assumes, was the likely conclusion by the editors that Maugham was but a dilettante, not an expert, who believed that Zurbarán “was no genius.”

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 24, 2026

Two of our esteemed gubernatorial candidates, the cowboy and the dilettante, apparently could not find ties for the first debate Wednesday night, showing up with dress shirts casually unbuttoned.

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 23, 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

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

She and Steven Weber play Debbie and Stew Klein, a couple of boomer dilettantes who crash their kid’s married life with the news that they’re in debt.

From New York Times ● Feb. 5, 2020

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

From Slate ● Feb. 8, 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

‘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

The very faults of the composition, which the dilettanti have picked out, were effective to men who had seen Paine on the march, and knew these things were written in sleepless intervals of unwearied labors.

From The Life Of Thomas Paine, Vol. I. (of II) With A History of His Literary, Political and Religious Career in America France, and England; to which is added a Sketch of Paine by William Cobbett by Moncure Daniel Conway

Farming is usually a very costly taste for dilettanti.

From Erlach Court by Ossip Schubin

Related Words

• connoisseur