copycat
Part of speech: noun
adj
verb
Morphological type: derivation
Etymology: Originally American English, from copy + cat (“a former derogatory term for a person”).
Base: copy
Inflected forms:
form: copycats
pos: noun
tags: plural
form: copy cat
pos: noun
tags: alternative
form: copy-cat
pos: noun
tags: alternative
form: more copycat
pos: adj
tags: comparative
form: most copycat
pos: adj
tags: superlative
form: copy cat
pos: adj
tags: alternative
form: copy-cat
pos: adj
tags: alternative
form: copycats
pos: verb
tags: present
singular
third-person
form: copycatting
pos: verb
tags: participle
present
form: copycatted
pos: verb
tags: participle
past
form: copycatted
pos: verb
tags: past
form: copy cat
pos: verb
tags: alternative
form: copy-cat
pos: verb
tags: alternative
Senses:
gloss: One who imitates or plagiarizes the work of others.
pos: noun
tags: derogatory
informal
examples: 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.
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.
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."
gloss: A criminal who imitates the crimes of another; specifically, a criminal who commits the same crime, especially a highly-publicized one, that has recently been committed by someone else.
pos: noun
examples: a copycat strangler
gloss: Imitative; unoriginal.
pos: adj
examples: copycat crime
“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.”
As one executive put it: Now in the beverage market we are to a great extent very copycat.
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.
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.
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”.
gloss: To act as a copycat; to copy in a shameless or derivative way.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: Because beasts don't talk with words, they talk with sounds, and I copycatted my language from beasts and birds[…]
In a genre that is rife with copycatting, Ms. Cain deserves some credit for having gotten a potentially interesting new series off the ground.
Derived words: copycatism
copycatter
Translations: