adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
ambitious
▪ The plan was very ambitious, but it worked.
ambitious/high
▪ The targets they have set themselves are hugely ambitious.
an ambitious goal (=an aim that will be difficult to achieve)
▪ The agreement set ambitious goals to cut greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.
an ambitious programme
▪ The European Community embarked on an ambitious programme of research.
an ambitious project
▪ Young people often enjoy the challenge of an ambitious project.
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADVERB
as
▪ Something as big as that. As ambitious.
highly
▪ They were relevant, exciting and highly ambitious in the knowledge and skills they demanded of teachers.
▪ He is highly ambitious and career-centred.
▪ Yet, such an integration would entail a highly ambitious legal and political undertaking.
less
▪ Perhaps, the Cancun failure encouraged the Commission to be less ambitious in its demands.
▪ While the system proposed now has a less ambitious goal than Star Wars, the task is still very difficult.
▪ Reyntiens' less celebrated, less ambitious collaborative windows are more successful.
▪ Albertina Sisulu Elderly people need to take more time over love-making and be less ambitious.
▪ Their mission was less ambitious than the day before: just to clear the air over the battlefield.
▪ Other schemes for the training of diplomats were less ambitious and even less effective.
▪ In the wake of this débâcle, subsequent attempts at policymaking were less ambitious, if not conspicuously more successful.
▪ Indeed, it is giving the impression of being much less ambitious and much more practical than in the past.
more
▪ Mike, who worked at Barclays Bank, was more ambitious.
▪ Hunt's Free is richer and more ambitious than 1959 in some ways, and less successful in others.
▪ But because business sites are more ambitious, their costs are often dramatically higher.
▪ It was Julie who had the sharper, more ambitious business mind and Tim is proud that it should have been so.
▪ To preserve nonuse will require policies more ambitious and comprehensive than the obsolete bipolar deterrence strategy.
▪ He was planning a more ambitious venture this time.
▪ Cooking anything more ambitious was a waste of time.
most
▪ When order is restored over the next few weeks, Lotus will be ready for the most ambitious expansion in its history.
▪ Epcot DiveQuest is one of the newest and most ambitious programs at Disney.
▪ The report openly admits that this is the most ambitious assessment scheme ever attempted in the world.
▪ A stultifying inversion has snuffed out some of the most ambitious air-quality bills in the Legislature this year.
▪ Scott-Scobie, he's one of the most ambitious young men at the Forbidden City.
▪ This, though less hazardous than the rape of Persephone, was perilous enough to satisfy the most ambitious.
▪ As if in answer to this prayer one further Pathfinders production was launched in 1961- the most ambitious to date, Pathfinders to Venus.
▪ One of the most ambitious of the Presbyterian preachers who embodied the new ministerial style was the Reverend Lyman Beecher.
over
▪ At the design stage it is easy to be over ambitious.
overly
▪ Phases 2 and 3 seem overly ambitious given the present circumstances.
▪ My goal at the moment is three times a week, perhaps overly ambitious.
so
▪ Leopards are by no means always so ambitious in choosing their victims.
▪ Naturally nothing so ambitious as the conquest of Hawaii had even entered our calculations.
▪ Roshanara Begum, with her less magnificent resources, was unable to contribute anything quite so ambitious.
▪ I'd never met anyone so ambitious and as single-minded.
too
▪ Don't be too ambitious in the early stages.
▪ Nothing more to hope for. Too ambitious, maybe.
▪ Buck was too ambitious with his shot from a bad lie.
▪ Maybe she will try writing again, nothing too ambitious, a fun poem in the limerick mode.
▪ The measurements so far suggest that this will be far too ambitious.
▪ But if it was educational for Amelia, she was much too ambitious for it to be satisfying.
▪ A bit too ambitious, that lad, he'd like to see me come unstuck.
▪ He was too ambitious on both counts.
very
▪ I was very ambitious to become a big success.
▪ My aunt Mary was petite, pretty, and very ambitious.
▪ He was very competent and very ambitious, but he was also a tyrant.
▪ As the title suggests, the scope of the book is very ambitious.
▪ He is very ambitious and will work on his nerve more than is right.
▪ He had visualised some one diamond-hard, very chic, very ambitious.
■ NOUN
attempt
▪ Congress also declined to cooperate with Reagan in many of his more ambitious attempts to reduce the size of the federal government.
▪ Even more ambitious attempts to bring trade unionists and community activists together in educational settings have taken place at Northern College.
goal
▪ The ambitious goal of reducing real total public expenditure in absolute terms was never achieved.
▪ While the system proposed now has a less ambitious goal than Star Wars, the task is still very difficult.
▪ Conductive education is also about setting ambitious goals, and then getting children to achieve them because they want a for themselves.
▪ They were always worrying about achieving some ambitious goal in the future, rather than simply sitting back and enjoying the moment.
▪ If it seems an ambitious goal, let me ask you a simple question.
▪ But it does fall short of the admittedly ambitious goal of being a unified, indispensable do-it-all communications program.
▪ Irving met that ambitious goal in only four.
man
▪ She had been out with a young lawyer once, a bumptious and ambitious man, and a boring one.
▪ Gutzon Borglum was an ambitious man, to his own mind a visionary.
▪ He was still the hard, ambitious man who had married her for her father's company, not for love.
▪ Like Tatum, Dzhabrailov was a dapper, ambitious man and the two hit it off for a while.
▪ That bustling, hustling, ambitious man who never listened and never gave up was now stiff and silent and still.
▪ The bond struck between these ambitious men was to endure.
▪ The endless levels might appear, superficially, to hold great promise of promotion for an ambitious man.
plan
▪ He often stopped reading or writing to stare into the distance, dreaming perhaps of some ambitious plan.
▪ Fixing Mars would not consume enough resources to interfere with any of our really ambitious plans.
▪ But such is the demand that studios have ambitious plans for expansion.
▪ Governments, industrialists, colonialists, charities and individuals have all devised ambitious plans to develop it.
▪ Giddy from their wartime success, the Communists launched an ambitious plan aimed at expanding the economy by 14 percent a year.
▪ Oil had stimulated new industry, cities were being modernized rapidly and ambitious plans promised change in the countryside.
▪ Gordon had ambitious plans for the department, and he was eager, in his restrained way, to move ahead.
programme
▪ While in office he was most noted for his ambitious programme of public works financed by foreign debt.
▪ That will make it hard to push through such an ambitious programme of reform.
▪ In fact, the Soviets were planning an ambitious programme called Zond.
▪ It proposed an ambitious programme of investment and the designation of Cabinet colleagues as ministers for various decaying areas.
▪ Since then the 25 business men and women on the committee have been working to an ambitious programme.
▪ Art &038; Tech has outlined an extremely ambitious programme that calls for three different mid-engined sports car to be produced.
project
▪ For truly ambitious projects, you might simply have to build your own.
▪ Union policies for new technology represent an ambitious project and negotiation of technology agreements is still at an early stage.
▪ The failure of ambitious projects within the Council was evident by the time of its second session in 1950.
▪ When 1 visited Hall and his colleagues there they were beginning their most ambitious project yet.
▪ But there is scope for competitive bidding in less ambitious projects.
▪ Jack's hobby was model making and he was currently engaged in a vast and ambitious project.
▪ More ambitious projects will be possible when you have become fully proficient with your new equipment.
▪ One particularly ambitious project involved setting up and staffing an advice centre within a hostel for homeless people.
scheme
▪ Only parts of this ambitious scheme were achieved.
▪ Clearly not all the ambitious schemes of the Stewart kings were successful.
▪ Paving slabs are available in a wide variety of shapes, colours and finishes to suit the most ambitious schemes.
▪ The biggest fiasco was the most ambitious scheme of all, the Masai Development Plan of the 1950s.
target
▪ Such an ambitious target was dependent upon adequate financial flows, access to the North's markets and secure oil supplies.
▪ It is an ambitious target, but Leblanc believes it is attainable.
▪ Now they are going for a more ambitious target - one company-wide registration to include safety, personnel and management services.
▪ They have set themselves hugely ambitious targets.
▪ Many analysts had called for a more ambitious target in reducing the budget deficit.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ Hutchings, like many ambitious young lawyers, became interested in politics.
▪ Linda has always been an ambitious and hard-working manager.
▪ The Harbor Tunnel is one of the most ambitious engineering projects of modern times.
▪ The main candidate for the position is Robert Lutz, age 59, an ambitious former Ford Motor Co. executive.
▪ Women have to be more ambitious than men if they want to get anywhere in the business world.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ He was too ambitious on both counts.
▪ I am delighted that they are ambitious for themselves.
▪ Neither does he know what it is not to be ambitious like him.
▪ The ambitious touring database proposals have been shelved.
▪ Whatever expectations his parents had of him, Valentin grew up the best-balanced and the least ambitious of their children.