copycat

Etymology

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

noun

1. (informal, derogatory) One who imitates or plagiarizes others' work.
   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
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

adj

1. 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
   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. 2012-12-19, 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”. 2023-07-06, Dan Milmo, quoting Mark Zuckerberg, “Zuckerberg uses Threads to say Twitter has missed its chance”, in The Guardian, →ISSN

verb

1. 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. September 3, 2007, Janet Maslin, “His Girl Friday Meets a Sadistically Chic Serial Killer”, in New York Times