unambitious
/ʌnamˈbɪʃəs
/adjective
1Not motivated or driven by a strong desire or determination to succeed: he was an unambitious man...
- Zapa is a slow, passive, unambitious 32-year-old locksmith, working in a small country town in Argentina.
- Ricky and I were the most unambitious people ever.
- Anyone who chooses to stay at home with their kids is seen as woefully unambitious and deserving of contempt.
1.1(Of a plan or piece of work) not involving anything new, exciting, or demanding: the new design is unambitious an unambitious curriculum...
- Critics claim the plan is unambitious and Scotland should settle for nothing less than a Glasgow-Edinburgh bullet train and extra stations.
- So, the state only funds very unambitious work - very reasonably they feel that to fund stuff that their constituency thinks is a pipedream would jeopardize re-election.
- The most successful doctoral students in my experience are the ones that are thorough and careful and take on relatively unambitious projects which don't stretch the assumptions or structures of the discipline too much.
Derivatives
unambitiously
- But to fail as Jeffrey Harrison does, so unambitiously, so droopily, to leave the plate with three called strikes-it smacks of faithlessness, of a kind of shrugging perfidy, a knowledge of what's expected.
- These are failed poems, and they fail unambitiously, and there is even a sense in which their failures are repetitive, merely typical.
- Nestling between the likes of The Fast and The Furious and Rush Hour, Half Past Dead tries unambitiously to be this year's biggest action flick.
unambitiousness
- Smith's new work presents a stark contrast to the unambitiousness of most new public buildings.
- The poems of Sydney Lea create, even in their apparent unambitiousness, a coherent and heart-touching world.
- But anyone who knows me could tell you that unambitiousness is one of the few things not included on my long list of flaws.