dead ringer
dead ringer noun: someone or something that very closely resembles another; someone or something easily mistaken for another.

Noun
dead ringer (plural dead ringers)
- Someone or something that very closely resembles another; someone or something easily mistaken for another.
- He is a dead ringer for his grandfather at that age.
- Hey, er, anybody ever tell you you're a dead ringer for…1953, Dalton Trumbo, Ian McLellan Hunter, John Dighton, Roman Holiday, spoken by Irving Radovich (Eddie Albert)
- Synonyms:
- spitting image, double, doppelganger, lookalike
Examples of dead ringer in a sentence
- In 1987, in “The Rules of Attraction,” he wrote about casual sex and obsessive drug use among bored students of a dead ringer for Bennington College, which Mr.2005 August 7, Edward Wyatt, “Bret Easton Ellis: The Man in the Mirror”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:
- He is world-famous writer Ezra Blazer, a dead ringer for Philip Roth, with whom Halliday had a relationship in her 20s.2018 February 28, Justine Jordan, “Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday review – a dizzying debut”, in The Guardian:
Synonyms of dead ringer
Forms of dead ringer
| plural | dead ringers |
|---|---|
| alternative form | dead-ringer |
| alternative form | deadringer |
Origin of dead ringer
See ringer (“substitute”) and ring the changes
Questions about dead ringer
- What does dead ringer mean?
- Dead ringer means someone or something that very closely resembles another; someone or something easily mistaken for another.
- How do you use dead ringer in a sentence?
- In 1987, in “The Rules of Attraction,” he wrote about casual sex and obsessive drug use among bored students of a dead ringer for Bennington College, which Mr.
- What part of speech is dead ringer?
- Dead ringer is a noun.
- What is the plural of dead ringer?
- The plural of dead ringer is dead ringers.
Words near dead ringer in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: dead ringer (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:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-dead ringer.ogg.
Cite this entry: “dead ringer.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dead_ringer. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
