copycat

• copy cat
• copy-cat

From copy +‎ cat (“former derogatory term for a person”).

copycat (plural copycats)

1. (informal, derogatory) One who imitates or plagiarizes others' work.
2. A criminal who imitates the crimes of another; specifically, a criminal who commits the same crime, especially a highly-publicized one, that has just been or recently committed by someone else.

   a copycat strangler

copycat (comparative more copycat, superlative most copycat)

1. Imitative; unoriginal.
   • 1997, “The Atlantic monthly”, in (Please provide the book title or journal name):

     "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.

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

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 New York Times‎:

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