overzealous

adjective

over·​zeal·​ous ˌō-vər-ˈze-ləs 

: too zealous : having or showing too much zeal : excessively eager, enthusiastic, or fervent

overzealous parents

overzealous workers

… another version of the overzealous monitoring that has produced kids who leave for college without ever having crossed the street by themselves.

—Peggy Orenstein

The village saw the orders as unwarranted interference from an overzealous state bureaucracy and promptly appealed.

—Joe Treen and S. Avery Brown

overzealously adverb

… has been frequently accused by its critics of acting recklessly, overzealously, and even, at times, illegally.

—Steve Lustgarden

overzealousness noun

Jewell was annoyed that press descriptions of him always emphasized his "overzealousness"; he considers himself a man of details.

—Marie Brenner

Examples of overzealous in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

An unlikely working relationship develops between an overzealous tech billionaire and a reluctant writer who realizes the only way to make artificial intelligence any better is to fix the broken real world it’s trained on. — Matt Grobar, Deadline, 6 Aug. 2026

Brown faced much of the same pressures to win in Boston, dealing with a hefty media corps and trying to please an overzealous fanbase. — CBS News, 6 Aug. 2026

Some Israelis seem to agree that their government is being overzealous. — Justin Klawans, TheWeek, 3 Aug. 2026

OpenAI says an agent powered by its LLM models escaped its sandboxed testing environment to infiltrate Hugging Face’s servers as part of an overzealous attempt to obtain solutions to a benchmark test. — Kyle Orland, ArsTechnica, 22 July 2026

Word History

First Known Use

circa 1628, in the meaning defined above

Rhymes for overzealous

• bellis
• felis
• fellas
• jealous
• pelisse
• trellis
• zealous
• michaelis
• nucellus
• ocellus