| / English Dictionary |
AMBITION
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (noun)
Sense 1
Meaning:
A strong drive for success
Synonyms:
ambition; ambitiousness
Classified under:
Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects
Hypernyms ("ambition" is a kind of...):
drive (the trait of being highly motivated)
Attribute:
ambitious (having a strong desire for success or achievement)
ambitionless; unambitious (having little desire for success or achievement)
Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "ambition"):
aspiration (a will to succeed)
power hunger; status seeking (a drive to acquire power)
Derivation:
ambition (have as one's ambition)
ambitious (having a strong desire for success or achievement)
Sense 2
Meaning:
A cherished desire
Example:
his ambition is to own his own business
Synonyms:
ambition; aspiration; dream
Classified under:
Nouns denoting feelings and emotions
Hypernyms ("ambition" is a kind of...):
desire (the feeling that accompanies an unsatisfied state)
Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "ambition"):
American Dream (the widespread aspiration of Americans to live better than their parents did)
emulation (ambition to equal or excel)
nationalism (the aspiration for national independence felt by people under foreign domination)
Derivation:
ambition (have as one's ambition)
ambitious (requiring full use of your abilities or resources)
II. (verb)
Sense 1
Meaning:
Have as one's ambition
Classified under:
Hypernyms (to "ambition" is one way to...):
desire; want (feel or have a desire for; want strongly)
Sentence frame:
Somebody ----s to INFINITIVE
Derivation:
ambition (a strong drive for success)
ambition (a cherished desire)
Context examples:
But he has no ambition and no energy.
(The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
Till you chose to turn her into a friend, her mind had no distaste for her own set, nor any ambition beyond it.
(Emma, by Jane Austen)
At that time my virtue slumbered; my evil, kept awake by ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion; and the thing that was projected was Edward Hyde.
(The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson)
Mycroft draws four hundred and fifty pounds a year, remains a subordinate, has no ambitions of any kind, will receive neither honour nor title, but remains the most indispensable man in the country.
(His Last Bow, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
His objections, the scruples of his integrity, seemed all done away, nobody could tell how; and the doubts and hesitations of her ambition were equally got over—and equally without apparent reason.
(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)
You think it is all for ambition, then?
(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)
You have no ambition, I well know.
(Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen)
What aim, what purpose, what ambition in life have you now?
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
There we left him then in the dim-lit London drawing-room, beside himself with pity for this shallow and most artificial woman, while without, at the edge of the Piccadilly curb, there stood the high dark berline ready to start him upon that long journey which was to end in his chase of the French fleet over seven thousand miles of ocean, his meeting with it, his victory, which confined Napoleon’s ambition for ever to the land, and his death, coming, as I would it might come to all of us, at the crowning moment of his life.
(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
And yet it was a surprise and a shock to himself to find how deeply she had entered into his life; how completely those vague ambitions and yearnings which had filled his spiritual nature centred themselves now upon this thing of earth.
(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
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