Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Desiring, attempting, or professing to be.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Wishing to be; vainly pretending to be; desirous of being or of being considered: as, a would-be philosopher.
- noun A vain pretender; one who affects to be something which he really is not.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Desiring or professing to be; vainly pretending to be.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective
attempting ordesiring something - adjective
unfulfilled orfrustrated inrealizing anambition
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective unfulfilled or frustrated in realizing an ambition
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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He granted interviews to all the television stations in town and called his would-be assassins maggots.
Kill the Irishman Rick Porrello 2011
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He granted interviews to all the television stations in town and called his would-be assassins maggots.
Kill the Irishman Rick Porrello 2011
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He granted interviews to all the television stations in town and called his would-be assassins maggots.
Kill the Irishman Rick Porrello 2011
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He granted interviews to all the television stations in town and called his would-be assassins maggots.
Kill the Irishman Rick Porrello 2011
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The aging inventor took out newspaper advertisements, calling his would-be rival out.
The Gun C. J. Chivers 2010
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Why, then, did the culture of American renegades get so little praise from the would-be evangelists of democracy?
A Renegade History of the United States Thaddeus Russell 2010
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During World War 2, a team of would-be German saboteurs landed in Montauk, and were detected but not apprehended by a coast guard sentry, only to fail in their missions, absorbed into society at large.
Michael Vazquez: Warhol Factory Auteur Paul Morrissey Premieres News From Nowhere In-Person at Lincoln Center Tonight Michael Vazquez 2011
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By way of a plot summary, News From Nowhere is also a story about a would-be conqueror who fails in his inchoate mission, specifically, an Argentine loner on the lam, arriving illegally by boat on Montauk's shores.
Michael Vazquez: Warhol Factory Auteur Paul Morrissey Premieres News From Nowhere In-Person at Lincoln Center Tonight Michael Vazquez 2011
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As also befits Morrissey's universe, there are two would-be controlling women with designs on said Adonis, in the aforementioned smuggler and painter who are played respectively by Olga Lirian who appears as herself in Let's Get Lost and factory legend Viva Hoffman, who delivers a line that could be straight from Morrissey's mouth, as she discusses her estate while proposing-slash-propositioning a pre-nup marraige to the Argentine: My father was smart.
Michael Vazquez: Warhol Factory Auteur Paul Morrissey Premieres News From Nowhere In-Person at Lincoln Center Tonight Michael Vazquez 2011
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• Perhaps not the best week for bloviators on Fox News to call for the abolition of the US's national weather service just because it's government-funded, but what are we to make of Republican God-botherer and would-be presidential candidate Michele Bachmann's suggestion that the east coast's hurricane was God's way of sending a message to America?
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