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. [from late 19th c.]
   • 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.

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. [from early 20th c.]
   • 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/

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copycat m (plural copycats)

1. copycat criminal

   Synonym: imitateur