aspiring

Pluralaspirings

1. 1
   adjective

   Hoping to become something, especially someone trying to enter a particular profession or role.

   The workshop was full of aspiring screenwriters pitching ideas to one another.

   An aspiring senator must build a base of donors long before any campaign begins.

   Similarambitious, would-be, wannabe

   Note

   Placed before a noun that names a role, it marks someone not yet there: aspiring pop stars, the aspiring politicians of Emma Goldman's 1910 essay, Tsitsi Dangarembga's aspiring young seamstresses. It does not take degrees, since nobody is more aspiring than another. Would-be and wannabe are its near neighbors. Keep it apart from the verb's participle, which needs to after it: aspiring to the stage.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of aspire.

   Young writers aspiring to publish a first novel often join workshops.

   Aspiring to a quieter life, they sold the house and moved north.

   Note

   The participle travels with to, followed either by a verb or by a noun: aspiring to compete, aspiring to a quieter life. In older English the verb had other uses that now survive only on the page. One was transitive, meaning to reach the top of something, and is now obsolete. The other is archaic and literary, meaning to rise upward or to stand very tall.

3. 3
   nounarchaic

   A strong desire or longing to achieve or become something.

   Her aspiring toward holiness defined the whole of her quiet life.

   No comfort could dampen his aspiring after fame and high office.

   Note

   A noun the language has since handed over to aspiration. Joseph Glanvill's "Scientifical aspirings" (1661), Samuel Johnson's "aspirings of unassuming trust" (1750) and Shelley's "thine aspirings bold" (1818) all reach for the plural, and that is where it still sounds most natural, as a deliberate period touch. In ordinary modern prose, write aspiration. Aspirings will read as old-fashioned or poetic.

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