copycat

• copy cat, copy-cat

Originally American English, from copy +‎ cat (“former derogatory term for a person”).

copycat (plural copycats)

1. (informal, derogatory) One who imitates or plagiarizes others' work.
   • 1899 July, Robert Grant, “Letter to a young man wishing to be an American”, in Scribner's Magazine‎, volume 26:

     And in it all they are merely copy-cats—servile followers of the aristocratic creed, but without the genuine prestige of the old-time nobilities.

   • 1921, Gene Stratton-Porter, Her Father's Daughter‎:

     I wanted to make them brilliant. I wanted to make them interesting. And of course I could not do it by myself. I am nothing but a copycat. I just quoted a lot of things I had heard you say; and I did worse than that, Peter.

   • 2000 August 1, Clay Chandler, “A Golden Goose in Red China? Entrepreneur Bets Millions That Foie Gras Will Fatten Export Figures”, in The Washington Post‎, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 28 August 2017‎:

     Early offerings--many of them packaged in sultry covers featuring buxom women in silk pajamas--were huge sellers. But when copycats and counterfeiters drove down margins, Chan switched to real estate, snapping up 200 acres of land in the city of Guigang and erecting dozens of office towers and residential developments. Among his most ambitious recent projects: a luxury Guigang housing complex dubbed "Wealthy Persons' New Town."

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 or recently been committed by someone else.

   a copycat strangler

copycat (comparative more copycat, superlative most copycat)

1. Imitative; unoriginal.

   copycat crime

   • 1998 July, Robert D. Kaplan, quoting Alex Villa, “Travels Into America's Future”, in The Atlantic‎:

     “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.

   • 2012 December 19, Zeynep Tufekci, “The Media Needs to Stop Inspiring Copycat Murders. Here's How.”, in The Atlantic‎:

     We need to figure out how to balance the public interest in learning about a mass shooting with the public interest in reducing copycat crime.

   • 2023 July 6, Dan Milmo, quoting Mark Zuckerberg, “Zuckerberg uses Threads to say Twitter has missed its chance”, in The Guardian‎, →ISSN:

     The chief executive and founder of Meta used his new Threads account to say Twitter had not “nailed” its opportunity to become a mega app and that his copycat version would be “focusing on kindness”.

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.
   • 1910, Gouverneur Morris, “Targets”, in The Spread Eagle and Other Stories‎:

     Because beasts don't talk with words, they talk with sounds, and I copycatted my language from beasts and birds […]

   • 2007 September 3, Janet Maslin, “His Girl Friday Meets a Sadistically Chic Serial Killer”, in New York Times‎:

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

• Douglas Harper (2001–2024) “copycat”, in Online Etymology Dictionary.
• “copycat”, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present.

Unadapted borrowing from English copycat.

• IPA^(key): /kɔ.pi.ka/, /kɔ.pi.kat/

• Audio:

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copycat m (plural copycats)

1. copycat criminal

   Synonym: imitateur