diffident

How To Use diffident In A Sentence

• Lee's was the voice of the teenage nonconformist, looking for kicks in a boring suburb, diffident at best about the family structures by which he was nevertheless completely defined.
• Phoebe contributed little to the talk, as a good deal of it was in Dutch and she felt sure that anything she might have to say would bear little weight with Corina, She offered more coffee, undertook to see that both her guests would be called betimes and asked diffidently if she could help Corina to pack. A Summer Idyll
• For those who are rather diffident about facing a public examination, there are helpful ‘proxy writers’ available.
• Emotionally diffident, he lacks the physical and dramatic force to invest the role with heroism.
• `Oh, well,' he shrugged diffidently, `I like the work.'
• Lucky ones who had bought of it diffidently, discreetly, with modest visions of four and a half per cent in their unimaginative minds, saw their dividends doubling, trebling, quadrupling, finally soaring gymnastically beyond all reason. Fanny Herself
• The very sight of him hovering diffidently in the corner of a room - with his beard and his home-trimmed hair and his schoolboyish little collar poking out of the top of his hand-knitted sweater and his palpable conscientious desperation not to cause any offence to anyone whatsoever - could make a red-blooded woman lose the will to live. Woodcraft Folk Memories
• Imprimis autem doceant suos, quibus sese alant, artes honestas, abstrahant ab otio, et veram in his omnibus fiduciam in Deum inserant, ne diffidentia ant securitate nimia aut avaritia foeda diffluant, nec ad ullum fructum perveniant. The Creeds of the Evangelical Protestant Churches.
• With his geeky look and diffident, nervy demeanour, he is best known for dark roles. Times, Sunday Times
• After reading her views on the debate, it makes me wish I had something weighty or political to say, but I'm a little diffident about the whole thing.