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cosplay

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

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A woman cosplaying the title character from Sailor Moon.

Etymology

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Borrowed from Japanese コスプレ (kosupure), which is a clipping of コスチュームプレイ (kosuchūmu purei), from a compound of English costume + play.

Pronunciation

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Noun

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cosplay (countable and uncountable, plural cosplays)

  1. (uncountable) The art or practice of costuming oneself as a (usually fictional) character.
    • 2003, Cosplay Girls: Japan's Live Animation Heroines:
      Men, of course, also participate in cosplay and all its attending events, but women make up the greater numbers.
    • 2006, Frenchy Lunning, Mechademia 1: Emerging Worlds of Anime And Manga, page 75:
      The environments and spaces created for and by cosplay provide cosplayers with a variety of spaces for social interactions.
    • 2010, Antonia Levi, Mark McHarry, Dru Pagliassotti, Boys' Love Manga, page 5:
      It didn't take long for anime cons and cosplay to become a part of popular culture fandom in the West […]
  2. (countable) A skit or instance of this art or practice.
    • 2010, Sarah Lynne Bowman, The Functions of Role-playing Games, page 29:
      Central to the activity of cosplay is elaborate costuming, though some cosplays are enacted using a game system.
    • 2010, Anne Cooper-Chen, Cartoon Cultures: The Globalization of Japanese Popular Media, page 121:
      According to a student from France who went to Japan to study Japanese, "Universities in France are like Halloween when otaku students engage in these cosplays. They take Japanese language because of anime, but they see after a few classes that it's hard and not fun. Many drop out" (author interview, 2009).
    • 2012, Dan Hunter, Ramon Lobato, Megan Richardson, Amateur Media: Social, cultural and legal perspectives:
      Popular cosplays include, for example, characters from the Final Fantasy range of games […]

Coordinate terms

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Translations

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Verb

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cosplay (third-person singular simple present cosplays, present participle cosplaying, simple past and past participle cosplayed)

  1. (intransitive) To costume oneself as a character.
    She cosplayed at the manga convention.
    • 2022 December 23, Marina Hyde, “Who can doubt the futuristic brilliance of Sunak and co? They’ve given us driverless government”, in The Guardian‎[1]:
      Senior politicians have cosplayed as train drivers, ambulance workers, Border Force officials – the list goes on.
  2. (transitive) To costume oneself as (a character).
    She cosplayed Sailor Moon at the manga convention.
  3. (figurative, often derogatory, transitive) To adopt the behavior and mannerisms of another.
    • 2022 March 17, Aila Slisco, “Ukrainian UN Ambassador Accuses Russians of Engaging in 'Nazi Cosplay'”, in Newsweek‎[2], retrieved 2022-03-18:
      Why has the Russian Federation decided to cosplay the Nazi Third Reich by attacking the peaceful neighboring state and plunging the region into war?
    • 2022, Ling Ma, “Office Hours”, in Bliss Montage, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, →ISBN:
      On weekends, there was usually a party. Her classmates, free from their wealthy families, cosplayed as struggling intellectuals.
    • 2022 May 30, Rebecca Solnit, “US mass shootings will continue until the majority can overrule the minority”, in The Guardian‎[3]:
      […] turning conservative white men into amateur commandos cosplaying war wherever they liked and the US into a war zone.
    • 2022 August 27, Drachinifel, 2:44 from the start, in Type 1936A / Narvik class - Guide 298‎[4], archived from the original on 29 August 2022:
      Whilst their stability was generally an improvement on earlier German destroyers, as the vessels no longer displayed a strong desire to cosplay as U-boats, the main armament proved to be something of a problem.
    • 2025 April 27, Pippa Crerar, quoting Paul Nowak, “Nigel Farage is a political fraud ‘cosplaying’ as working-class champion, TUC chief says”, in The Guardian‎[5], →ISSN:
      Nigel Farage is a “political fraud and hypocrite” who is “cosplaying” as a working-class champion in order to win votes at this week’s local elections, the UK’s most senior union chief has warned.

Coordinate terms

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Derived terms

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Descendants

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Translations

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See also

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Further reading

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Anagrams

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Norwegian Bokmål

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Etymology

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Borrowed from English cosplay.

Noun

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cosplay n (definite singular cosplayet, indefinite plural cosplay, definite plural cosplaya or cosplayene)

  1. cosplay (The practice)
  2. cosplay (A specific instance)
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Norwegian Nynorsk

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Etymology

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Borrowed from English cosplay.

Noun

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cosplay n (definite singular cosplayet, indefinite plural cosplay, definite plural cosplaya)

  1. cosplay (The practice)
  2. cosplay (A specific instance)
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Polish

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Polish Wikipedia has an article on:
Wikipedia pl

Etymology

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Unadapted borrowing from English cosplay.

Pronunciation

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Noun

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cosplay m inan (related adjective cosplayowy)

  1. cosplay (art or practice of costuming oneself as a (usually fictional) character)

Declension

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Declension of cosplay
singular
nominative cosplay
genitive cosplayu
dative cosplayowi
accusative cosplay
instrumental cosplayem
locative cosplayu
vocative cosplayu
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nouns

Further reading

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  • cosplay at Obserwatorium językowe Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego

Portuguese

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Portuguese Wikipedia has an article on:
Wikipedia pt

Etymology

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Unadapted borrowing from English cosplay.

Pronunciation

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  • (Brazil) IPA(key): /kosˈplej/ [kosˈpleɪ̯], /kɔsˈplej/ [kɔsˈpleɪ̯]
 

Noun

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cosplay m (uncountable)

  1. cosplay (art of dressing as characters)
    Fazer cosplay de um personagem. ― To cosplay as a character.
  2. cosplay (instance of dressing as a character)

Quotations

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Further reading

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Spanish

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Etymology

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Unadapted borrowing from English cosplay.

Pronunciation

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  • IPA(key): /kosˈplei/ [kosˈplei̯]
  • IPA(key): /ˈkosplei/ [ˈkos.plei̯]
  • Syllabification: cos‧play

Noun

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cosplay m (plural cosplays)

  1. cosplay
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