copycat

US/kɑpiˈkæt/

copycat noun: one who imitates or plagiarizes the work of others.

Noun

copycat (plural copycats)

(derogatory, informal) One who imitates or plagiarizes the work of others.
- 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.1899 July, Robert Grant, “Letter to a young man wishing to be an American”, in Scribner's Magazine, volume 26
- 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.1921, Gene Stratton-Porter, Her Father's Daughter
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.
- a copycat strangler

Adjective

copycat (comparative more copycat, superlative most copycat)

Imitative; unoriginal.
- 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.”1998 July, Robert D. Kaplan, quoting Alex Villa, “Travels Into America's Future”, in The Atlantic

Verb

copycat (third-person singular simple present copycats, present participle copycatting, simple past and past participle copycatted)

(transitive) To act as a copycat; to copy in a shameless or derivative way.
- Because beasts don't talk with words, they talk with sounds, and I copycatted my language from beasts and birds[…]1910, Gouverneur Morris, “Targets”, in The Spread Eagle and Other Stories
- In a genre that is rife with copycatting, Ms. Cain deserves some credit for having gotten a potentially interesting new series off the ground.2007 September 3, Janet Maslin, “His Girl Friday Meets a Sadistically Chic Serial Killer”, in New York Times

copycat meaning in Hindi, Tagalog, Arabic and Indonesian

copycat in Hindi

copycat: नक़लची naqalcī

copycat in Tagalog

one who imitates or plagiarizes others' work: gaya-gaya

copycat in Arabic

one who imitates or plagiarizes others' work: مُقَلِّد muqallid

copycat in Indonesian

one who imitates or plagiarizes others' work: peniru

Examples of copycat in a sentence

As one executive put it: Now in the beverage market we are to a great extent very copycat.1997, Daniel Miller, Capitalism: an ethnographic approach:
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.2009, Alan Cole, Fathering your father: the Zen of fabrication in Tang Buddhism:
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.2012 December 19, Zeynep Tufekci, “The Media Needs to Stop Inspiring Copycat Murders. Here's How.”, in The Atlantic:
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”.2023 July 6, Dan Milmo, quoting Mark Zuckerberg, “Zuckerberg uses Threads to say Twitter has missed its chance”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:

Forms of copycat

Noun
plural	copycats
alternative form	copy cat
alternative form	copy-cat
Adjective
comparative	more copycat
superlative	most copycat
Verb
third-person singular present	copycats
present participle	copycatting
past participle	copycatted
past	copycatted

Origin of copycat

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

Words formed from copycat

Questions about copycat

What does copycat mean?: Copycat means one who imitates or plagiarizes the work of others.
What is copycat in Hindi?: Copycat in Hindi is नक़लची (naqalcī). See Copycat meaning in Hindi.
How do you use copycat in a sentence?: As one executive put it: Now in the beverage market we are to a great extent very copycat.
What part of speech is copycat?: Copycat can be a noun, an adjective or a verb.
How do you pronounce copycat?: Copycat is pronounced /kɑpiˈkæt/ (US).
What is the plural of copycat?: The plural of copycat is copycats.

Words near copycat in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: copycat (page history and authors); नक़लची (Hindi) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-copycat.wav.

Cite this entry: “copycat.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/copycat. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.