What's the difference between dabbler and dilettante?

Dabbler


Definition:

  • (n.) One who dabbles.
  • (n.) One who dips slightly into anything; a superficial meddler.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) In an active life he was doctor, dentist, orator, editor, publisher, Harvard medical student, explorer, dabbler in Central American politics, army officer, and Reconstruction office seeker.
  • (2) Furthermore, these results show that little can be learned about cardiac responses in free diving ducks from studies of forced dives in dabblers or divers.
  • (3) On screen, after all, she has come to ennoble the dabblers.
  • (4) The few among them who attempt to do something in what is, after all, the history of their profession, are often considered, by historians, naive dabblers who lack knowledge and capacity for the task.
  • (5) An occult dabbler (“dressed in Crowley’s uniform”), Bowie clearly relished the role of “superbeing”, living on the edge, pushing himself ever harder.
  • (6) Born in 1714 into a well-to-do family of farmers and clergy in north Wales, Wilson trained as a portrait painter in London, but was considered to be something of a dabbler.
  • (7) You’ll be a dabbler.’” She shakes her head at the memory: “And if you hear a certain criticism at a certain point in your life, it sticks with you.
  • (8) I thought that was it, I’d for ever be a dabbler.” Is this such a bad thing?
  • (9) The UN's special rapporteur on housing, Raquel Rolnik, a Brazilian academic, was dubbed a "Brazil nut" and "a dabbler in witchcraft who offered an animal sacrifice to Marx" in some of Wednesday's newspapers after she had called for the bedroom tax to be abolished.
  • (10) Even if you did, though, you’re probably a dabbler: you have little choice.
  • (11) They were all romancers, metaphysicals, dabblers in literary alchemy determined to spin gossamer filigree out of the apparently unpromising stuff of American life.
  • (12) Diving bradycardia is driven by chemoreceptors in the dabbler and caused by stimulation of narial receptors in the diver.

Dilettante


Definition:

  • (v. t.) An admirer or lover of the fine arts; popularly, an amateur; especially, one who follows an art or a branch of knowledge, desultorily, or for amusement only.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) As if to prove her silly dilettantism, when a journalist asked Dasha about her favourite artists, she replied, "I'm, like, really bad at remembering names."
  • (2) No dilettante side-project of the idle millionaire rock star, this.
  • (3) Those who have worked closely with the foreign secretary in the past say his ego is more fragile than it can appear, and he is sensitive to the accusation of being a political dilettante.
  • (4) In the reality of the early 1960s, he was the wealthy playboy-dilettante secretary of state for war who almost destroyed Harold Macmillan's Conservative government by the discovery of his dalliance with the dancer and call-girl Christine Keeler, who was also said to be sleeping with the Soviet naval attaché Evegeny Ivanov.
  • (5) An open recognition of the problems in the psychoanalytic study of literature should serve to minimize dilettantism and raise the level of scholarship.
  • (6) In 1666, he's angry about the smug dilettantism of the courtly elite, and the appalling arse-licking conformity that even his closest friend indulges in.
  • (7) And Vronsky’s own dilettante-ish attempt to paint Anna is abandoned: a bad and complex omen.
  • (8) Nevertheless it proved Bonaparte a bona fide creative psychoanalyst and not a dilettante propped up by her friendship with Freud.
  • (9) "There's no need to be artsy-fartsy … only dilettantes prefer enigmatic works."
  • (10) Ronson admits it rankles when people assume he got his breaks because of his privileged background or that he is little more than a millionaire dilettante, playing with his electronic synths and Gucci-designed shoes whenever the fancy takes him.
  • (11) Bush isn’t succumbing to Sting-esque world music dilettantism, though, as the seemingly incongruous parts are all held together in service of her unique musical vision.
  • (12) The documentary explores the headlong rush of a brilliant schoolboy with illegible handwriting who enjoyed the dilettante life of Oxford University before illness sparked a lifelong frenzy of discovery about the origins of the universe, which began as a graduate at Cambridge University and has astounded the world.
  • (13) Russell Brand's call on the young not to vote was the pseudo-leftism of a dumb dilettante precisely because politicians can ignore the interests of the young when the young do not threaten them at the polling booths.
  • (14) "[Gandhi] came off as a practiced politician who knew how to get his message across, was precise and articulate and demonstrated a mastery that belied the image some have of [him] as a dilettante," the official said.
  • (15) Her Stakhanovite work rate as a writer and as a working peer made most of us feel like dilettantes.
  • (16) Along the way, there has been the worst kind of ministerial dilettantism and inconsistency.
  • (17) Unlike his TV persona as Jack Donaghy on 30 Rock , the self-described dilettante is an intelligent interviewer with a voice that mesmerises.
  • (18) It's hard to work out if Lebedev worries about whether people see him as a spoilt, rich dilettante.
  • (19) His appointment was not a success, not least with Castle, who regarded him as a dilettante, not really interested in pursuing his policies and proposed legislation.
  • (20) Unlike dilettante-esque me, most of the journalists out in Brazil will be there for the full five weeks.