Word.ws English Dictionary

imposter

imposter is the alternative spelling of impostor.

Meaning of impostor

Noun

impostor (plural impostors)

  1. Someone who attempts to deceive by using an assumed name or identity.
    • "It were dishonour in me to yield. I will not play the part of an impostor, whom my uncle must despise even while he screens. No; these estates are his right: let him take them; I will not buy them with his daughter's hand."1837, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], “The Consent”, in Ethel Churchill: Or, The Two Brides. […], volume I, London: Henry Colburn, […], →OCLC, page 153
  2. A sprite or animation integrated into a three-dimensional scene to look like part of the 3D world.
  3. A term referenced in an unusual grammatical person.
    • Interestingly, Wang shows that Chinese allows the appearance of an indexical pronoun alongside the imposter, as in (31).2014, Daniel Kaufman, “The Syntax of Indonesian Imposters”, in Chris Collins, editor, Cross-Linguistic Studies of Imposters and Pronominal Agreement, →ISBN, page 105

Forms of imposter

pluralimposters

Origin of imposter

Replacement of impostor -or with -er.

Words formed from imposter

Questions about imposter

What is imposter the alternative spelling of?
Imposter is the alternative spelling of impostor.

Words near imposter in the dictionary

  1. impossibleness
  2. impossibles
  3. impossiblest
  4. impossibly
  5. impost
  6. imposter
  7. imposterhood
  8. imposterous
  9. imposters
  10. impostership
  11. imposthumate

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: imposter (page history and authors); impostor (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.

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

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