ambition
noun/æmˈbɪʃ.ən/
A strong desire to rise.
“Her ambition scared the board.”
Origin
Where ambition comes from
Latin ambitio, a going around. Roman candidates walked the streets asking for votes.1
Route to English
- ambitioLatin. “a going around”.
- ambitionFrench.
- ambitionEnglish.
Synonyms
Measured
The word, measured
Psychologists have asked thousands of people about tens of thousands of words. Here is where ambition lands in six of those datasets.
How many people know it
Of 454 people shown it, 100.0% said they knew it, more than for 97% of the 61,855 words tested. Estimates by group: Americans 99.5%, British 99.5%, men 99%, women 99.5%.3
When people learn it
The average age adults recall learning it, later than about 51% of 31,105 words. The middle word on the list comes at 11.2. These are adults’ estimates, so read them as a rough guide.4
How concrete it feels
People rate it as more of an idea than a thing, more abstract than 92% of 39,954 words. Agreement is moderate: 27 raters, standard deviation 0.98.6
How it feels emotionally
It leans pleasant, above 97% of 13,915 words, and raters mostly agree (standard deviation 1.62). It’s more arousing than 78% of those words at 4.86. On dominance it scores 6.36, higher than 90%, meaning people feel more in control.7
Which sense it calls up
Sight comes first, stronger than for 33% of 39,707 words, and the feeling inside the body is close behind at 92%.8
Scale 0 to 5.
Ratings come from panels of roughly 20 to 30 people per word, asked about the word out of context. Percentages are how ambition ranks among the words in that dataset.
Over time
How often books have used ambition
Google counted the words in millions of scanned English books. This line shows how often ambition turned up in them from 1700 on.
Where does your vocabulary land?
Twelve words, each known by fewer Americans than the last. See your estimate against the same 221,268 people in the study above.3
Measure my vocabularySources
Where every claim comes from
The numbers in the measured section were calculated from the data files listed below. The story and route come from the Lexicist word card, checked against Wiktionary. Synonyms and antonyms come from Datamuse and Wiktionary. Checked on 6 November 2026. If something is wrong, write to hello@lexicist.com.
- Wiktionary, “ambition”, English section. en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ambition
- Datamuse API, related words for “ambition”: rel_syn and rel_ant. Datamuse’s lists are based on WordNet.
- Brysbaert, M., et al. “Word prevalence norms for 62,000 English lemmas”. Behavior Research Methods 51 (2019): 467–479. doi.org/10.3758/s13428-018-1077-9
- Kuperman, V., et al. “Age-of-acquisition ratings for 30,000 English words”. Behavior Research Methods 44 (2012): 978–990. doi.org/10.3758/s13428-012-0210-4
- Brysbaert, M., and B. New. “Moving beyond Kučera and Francis”. Behavior Research Methods 41 (2009): 977–990. doi.org/10.3758/BRM.41.4.977
- Brysbaert, M., et al. “Concreteness ratings for 40 thousand generally known English word lemmas”. Behavior Research Methods 46 (2014): 904–911. doi.org/10.3758/s13428-013-0403-5
- Warriner, A. B., et al. “Norms of valence, arousal, and dominance for 13,915 English lemmas”. Behavior Research Methods 45 (2013): 1191–1207. doi.org/10.3758/s13428-012-0314-x
- Lynott, D., et al. “The Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms”. Behavior Research Methods 52 (2020): 1271–1291. doi.org/10.3758/s13428-019-01316-z
- Google Books Ngram Viewer, English 2019 corpus, 1700–2022, smoothing 3. Open the chart. Method: Michel, J.-B., et al. Science 331 (2011): 176–182. doi.org/10.1126/science.1199644
Audio credit
Recording: Dvortygirl (US), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.