overachiever
Americannoun
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overachievers
plural
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a person who performs better or achieves more than people are generally expected to, often because of high ambition, pressure from family, etc..
Ever the overachiever, he reached his sales goal for the year a whopping five months early.
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a person who performs, especially academically, above the potential indicated by tests of their mental ability or aptitude.
We found many overachievers with modest SAT scores who nevertheless achieved high GPAs across a variety of majors.
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of overachiever
First recorded in 1935–40; over- ( def. ) + achieve ( def. ) + -er 1 ( def. )
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.
See Examples For:
Chicken, however, is omnipresent — the quiet overachiever of the protein world, endlessly adaptable and perennially in demand.
From Salon ● Apr. 26, 2026
If the bare minimum is enough for you to be seen and recognized for solid work, there might be no need to become an office overachiever.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 30, 2025
You’re an overachiever, a Berkeley grad and former Groundlings member.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 11, 2025
Mr. Cherry is best known for his role as the snarky overachiever Dylan in the dystopian Apple TV+ workplace thriller series “Severance.”
From New York Times ● Apr. 6, 2024
She’s in the one and only elective class she has all year, because she’s an overachiever.
From "A Heart in a Body in the World" by Deb Caletti
That human dynamic allowed Rose to mold a bunch of basketball’s castoffs and underdogs into the greatest group of overachievers in NBA history.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 15, 2026
We've even seen how results of teams eventually fall in line with their underlying numbers over the course of this season, with early overachievers Aston Villa and Sunderland.
From BBC ● May 8, 2026
Like any friend group, “Next Gen NYC” is filled with overachievers and underachievers; people who have family money and people who work long hours, scraping by to make their way in the big city.
From Salon ● Aug. 2, 2025
Let’s bury the narrative that these Dawgs were a group of overachievers who didn’t belong in the same class as the country’s elite.
From Seattle Times ● Dec. 1, 2023
They were a classic bunch of overachievers who had become living proof of all the perceived values of white working-class and middle-class America—desire, self-sacrifice, pushing oneself beyond the expected limit.
From "Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team, And A Dream" by H.G. Bissinger
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
