ENTERPRISING

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does enterprising mean? 

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

1. marked by imagination, initiative, and readiness to undertake new projects

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

 Dictionary entry details 

• ENTERPRISING (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Marked by imagination, initiative, and readiness to undertake new projects

Context example:

an enterprising young man likely to go far

Similar:

energetic; gumptious; industrious; up-and-coming (working hard to promote an enterprise)

entrepreneurial (willing to take risks in order to make a profit)

Also:

adventuresome; adventurous (willing to undertake or seeking out new and daring enterprises)

ambitious (having a strong desire for success or achievement)

energetic (possessing or exerting or displaying energy)

Antonym:

unenterprising (lacking in enterprise; not bold or venturesome)

Derivation:

enterprisingness (readiness to embark on bold new ventures)

 Context examples 

The breakfast was a success, and we sat about the fire much longer than enterprising explorers should have done, sipping the hot black coffee and talking over our situation.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

By all which, instead of being discouraged, they are fifty times more violently bent upon prosecuting their schemes, driven equally on by hope and despair: that as for himself, being not of an enterprising spirit, he was content to go on in the old forms, to live in the houses his ancestors had built, and act as they did, in every part of life, without innovation: that some few other persons of quality and gentry had done the same, but were looked on with an eye of contempt and ill-will, as enemies to art, ignorant, and ill common-wealth’s men, preferring their own ease and sloth before the general improvement of their country.

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

What with your eternal tobacco, Watson, and your irregularity at meals, I expect that you will get notice to quit, and that I shall share your downfall—not, however, before we have solved the problem of the nervous tutor, the careless servant, and the three enterprising students.

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)