Copycat

Alternative forms

• copy cat
• copy-cat

Origin

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

Full definition of copycat

Noun

1. (informal) One who imitates others' work without adding ingenuity.
2. A criminal who imitates the crimes of another.a copycat strangler

Adjective

1. Imitative; unoriginal.
• 1997, The Atlantic monthly, "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

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