copycat

See also: copy-cat and copy cat

English

Alternative forms

• copy cat
• copy-cat

Etymology

From copy + cat ‎(“person”). It has been in use since at least 1896, in Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs.

Noun

copycat ‎(plural copycats)

1. (informal) One who imitates others' work without adding ingenuity.
2. A criminal who imitates the crimes of another; specifically, a criminal who commits the same crime, especially a highly-publicized one, that has just been or recently committed by someone else.

   a copycat strangler

Translations

one who imitates others' work without adding ingenuity

• Arabic: تَقْلِيد ‎(taqlīd)
• Bulgarian: имитатор (bg) m ‎(imitator), подражател (bg) m ‎(podražatel)
• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 跟风狗

• Dutch: naäper
• Estonian: järeleahvija, plagiaator
• Finnish: matkija (fi), jäljittelijä
• French: copycat (fr) m, imitateur (fr) m, copieur (fr) m, faussaire (fr) m
• German: Nachahmer, Nachäffer

• Japanese: ^{(please verify)} パクり ‎(pakuri)
• Latvian: pakaļdarinātājs m
• Macedonian: папагал m ‎(papagál)
• Portuguese: copião (pt), imitador m, imitadora f
• Russian: имита́тор (ru) m ‎(imitátor), подража́тель (ru) m ‎(podražátelʹ)
• Serbo-Croatian: imitator (sh), oponašatelj (sh), epigon (sh)
• Spanish: copión (es) m, copiona (es) f
• Swedish: efterapare, härmapa (sv)

Adjective

copycat ‎(comparative more copycat, superlative most copycat)

1. Imitative; unoriginal.
   • 1997, “The Atlantic monthly”, in (Please provide the title of the work):

     "Because of my size, I was a natural leader in junior high school. Gangs are the most copycat of subcultures. It used to be zoot suits; now it's tattoos. When I was thirteen, I got a tattoo"

   • 1997, Daniel Miller, Capitalism: an ethnographic approach:

     As one executive put it: Now in the beverage market we are to a great extent very copycat.

   • 2009, Alan Cole, Fathering your father: the Zen of fabrication in Tang Buddhism:

     It was that very copycat kind of "grandfather stealing" that makes Jinjue's text look like the son of Du Fei's Record, even as it works to push Du Fei's "father-text" out of the way.

Verb

copycat ‎(third-person singular simple present copycats, present participle copycatting, simple past and past participle copycatted)

1. To act as a copycat; to copy in a shameless or derivative way
   • 2007 September 3, Janet Maslin, “His Girl Friday Meets a Sadistically Chic Serial Killer”, in New York Times^[1]:

     In a genre that is rife with copycatting, Ms. Cain deserves some credit for having gotten a potentially interesting new series off the ground.