ASPIRING

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does aspiring mean? 

• ASPIRING (adjective)
  The adjective ASPIRING has 1 sense:

1. desiring or striving for recognition or advancement

  Familiarity information: ASPIRING used as an adjective is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• ASPIRING (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Desiring or striving for recognition or advancement

Synonyms:

aspirant; aspiring; wishful

Similar:

ambitious (having a strong desire for success or achievement)

 Context examples 

This year it was to be a plantation of sun flowers, the seeds of which cheerful and aspiring plant were to feed Aunt Cockle-top and her family of chicks.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

Why was he beaten out of heaven? Because he was less brave than God? less proud? less aspiring? No! A thousand times no!

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

This he resented, and when she stood shoulder to shoulder with him, bristling and showing her teeth, the aspiring solitary ones would back off, turn-tail, and continue on their lonely way.

(White Fang, by Jack London)

He made me observe, that among the Houyhnhnms, the white, the sorrel, and the iron-gray, were not so exactly shaped as the bay, the dapple-gray, and the black; nor born with equal talents of mind, or a capacity to improve them; and therefore continued always in the condition of servants, without ever aspiring to match out of their own race, which in that country would be reckoned monstrous and unnatural.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

I begged him to excuse me, and get some other partner—but no, not he; after aspiring to my hand, there was nobody else in the room he could bear to think of; and it was not that he wanted merely to dance, he wanted to be with me.

(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)

The warm spring sunshine brought out all sorts of aspiring ideas, tender hopes, and happy thoughts.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)