Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use ambitious in a sentence

40 example sentences · adjective

Ambitious means having or showing ambition; wanting a lot of power, honor, respect, superiority, or other distinction. Example: “They proposed an ambitious plan to bank people in remote rural communities.”

Examples of ambitious by meaning

adjectiveHaving or showing ambition; wanting a lot of power, honor, respect, superiority, or other distinction.

  • an ambitious person
  • someone's ambitious nature

adjectiveResulting from, characterized by, or indicating, ambition.

  • an ambitious project
  • an ambitious style
  • an ambitious attempt to take power

adjectiveHard to achieve.

  • an ambitious goal

More sentences with ambitious

  • They proposed an ambitious plan to bank people in remote rural communities.From the entry bank
  • Ten years of this soul-sucking job would turn any ambitious young person into a burnout.From the entry burnout
  • His ambitious plan to build a flying car died on the vine.From the entry die on the vine
  • The candidate made some ambitious promises in his campaign speech.From the entry speech
  • Good political staff is hard to find, they may neither be ambitious and corrupted by power nor tempted by private sector careers.From the entry political
  • A bright, ambitious kid just out of technical school, learning railroading from the ground up.2014, Maxwell Grant, The Pooltex Tangle. From the entry from the ground up
  • Brainish men are ambitious and incapable, while discreet men are timid and excessively conservative.2012, You-sheng Chen, LunYu - Confucian Analects in Chinese & English. From the entry brainish
  • In appropriate Shatnerian style, it quickly became a very ambitious undertaking.2007, Glen Dresser, Janine Vangool, The Shatner Show. From the entry Shatnerian
  • The overassured manager may not seek to appreciate all the risks entailed in an ambitious decision.2005, Jonathan P. Doh, Stephen A. Stumpf, Handbook on Responsible Leadership and Governance in Global Business, →ISBN, pages 79–80. From the entry underassured
  • He didn't know then that he had hired the Attila the Hun of ambitious young lawyers.2003, Gina F. Wilkins, The Family Plan, page 9. From the entry Attila the Hun
  • Among his most ambitious recent projects: a luxury Guigang housing complex dubbed "Wealthy Persons' New Town."2000 August 1, Clay Chandler, “A Golden Goose in Red China? Entrepreneur Bets Millions That Foie Gras Will Fatten Export Figures”, in The…. From the entry counterfeiter
  • This "secret capital" of China has set some ambitious goals for itself.1999, “Shanghai”, in The Book of the World, 2nd United States edition (Atlas), Macmillan, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 411, column 1. From the entry come out
  • The bull-in-a-china-shop behavior is tolerated because many administrators think ambitious people should behave this way.1999, Tom Edel, Wake Me When It's Time to Work, page 119. From the entry bull-in-a-china-shop
  • The Government's most ambitious plan is to create a software industry almost from scratch.1992 October 25, Michael Stroud, “A Shakeout Looms for Taiwan's Computer Companies”, in The Washington Post, archived from the original on…. From the entry from scratch
  • Estonia has declared itself a sovereign state and is drafting ambitious plans for economic autonomy.1989 May, Priit J. Vesilind, “The Baltic: Arena of Power”, in National Geographic, volume 175, number 5, page 604. From the entry Estonia
  • But then who knows what goes on inside the minds of ambitious, proud Ibo fathers?1986, Buchi Emecheta, Head Above Water. An Autobiography. p.11. From the entry Adolphus
  • In subsequent years Chang Chien had ambitious plans for further expansion.1965, Samuel C. Chu, Reformer in Mondern China Chang Chien, 1853-1926, Columbia University Press, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 31. From the entry mill
  • It is part of what is intended, is indeed, an ambitious plan of armed conquest.1958, President Dwight Eisenhower, 0:49 from the start, in President Eisenhower Speaks On The Formosa Situation (1958), British Pathé…. From the entry Quemoy
  • Many ambitious men have used these adlets to better their positions and incomes.1916, Hide and Leather's Year Book and Directory for .... From the entry adlet
  • The most ambitious initiative is a European-wide “drone wall” that can detect, jam and destroy Russian aerial vehicles.2025 November 17, Fred Harter, “Mysterious drone sightings are causing alarm across Europe”, in The Observer, The Sensemaker. From the entry drone wall
  • "But we wanted to be more ambitious.2023 May 17, Paul Clifton, “Building bridges to Ukraine...”, in RAIL, number 983, page 31. From the entry blow up
  • Copy boys wanted for expanding staff of ambitious regional newspaper.2020, Shelley Blanton-Stroud, Copy Boy: A Jane Benjamin Novel, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN. From the entry copy boy
  • With this understanding, zero preventable deaths and life-changing injuries becomes more than a vision, but instead a realistically ambitious goal.2018 July 16, Michèle Pezzagno, Maurizio Tira, Town and Infrastructure Planning for Safety and Urban Quality: Proceedings of the XXIII…. From the entry life-changing
  • The momentous term culturomics suggests the authors’ ambitious view of what can seem like an intellectual parlor game.2013 December 24, William Grimes, “Big Data Becomes a Mirror”, in New York Times. From the entry culturomics
  • The mistake of overplacement has led eager and ambitious entrepreneurs to throw their life savings into ventures that fail.2012, Max H. Bazerman, Don A. Moore, Judgment in Managerial Decision Making, page 27. From the entry overplacement
  • Using charts to identify trends is probably the slickest of the expert liar's tricks, and this stuff can get ambitious, mathwise.2011, Gerald Everett Jones, How to Lie with Charts, page 16. From the entry mathwise
  • Channel 4's ambitious plans to move into digital radio were largely ignored last week at its glitzy presentation.2008 March 17, Maggie Brown, The Guardian. From the entry that was it
  • To be sure, most reliabilists don’t want to be too ambitious in what they include in their foundations.2008 November 22, Richard Fumerton, “Luminous enough for a cognitive home”, in Philosophical Studies, volume 142, number 1, →DOI. From the entry reliabilist
  • In these dire conditions the ambitious Serbo-Croatian Communist Party apparatchik Slobodan Milošević played the national card in Kosovo.2007, Elizabeth Roberts, Realm of the Black Mountain: A History of Montenegro, Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OL, page 34. From the entry apparatchik
  • The Amtrak brand revitalization approach represents one of the most ambitious, comprehensive, and systematic experiential marketing approaches I have ever seen.1999, Bernd Schmitt, Experiential marketing, page 39. From the entry brand
  • Their registers characterised him as a stubborn, repentless young man, very ambitious and manifesting even signs of atheism.1992, Cicily Kodiyan, Eminent Russian Scientists, page 24. From the entry repentless
  • His mother wore the trousers, and father, a gentle man who worked in local government, was not ambitious enough for her.1988, John Rowan, Windy Dryden, Innovative Therapy in Britain, page 246. From the entry wear the trousers
  • For the ambitious passengers there is always the opportunity to jog around the deck followed up by an early sunriser's breakfast.1978, Brand Book, page 26. From the entry sunriser
  • Gordon Strachan, one of those corruptibly ambitious aides cloned by the Nixon administration, once carefully catalogued five varieties of leaks.1974, Thomas Griffith, chapter 14, in How True: A Skeptic’s Guide to Believing the News, Boston: Little, Brown & Co., page 172. From the entry corruptibly

Meaning of ambitious

  1. adjective Having or showing ambition; wanting a lot of power, honor, respect, superiority, or other distinction.
  2. adjective Very desirous.
  3. adjective Resulting from, characterized by, or indicating, ambition.

Full definition of ambitious

Questions about ambitious in a sentence

How do you use ambitious in a sentence?
Ambitious is used as an adjective. For example: “They proposed an ambitious plan to bank people in remote rural communities.”
What is a short sentence with ambitious?
“an ambitious goal”
What does ambitious mean?
Ambitious means having or showing ambition; wanting a lot of power, honor, respect, superiority, or other distinction.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ambitious (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this page: “How to use ambitious in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/ambitious. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.