copycat

noun

1. (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.”

   “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.”

   “Early offerings--many of them packaged in sultry covers featuring buxom women in silk pajamas--were huge sellers. But when copycats and counterfeiters drove down margins, Chan switched to real estate, snapping up 200 acres of land in the city of Guigang and erecting dozens of office towers and residential developments. Among his most ambitious recent projects: a luxury Guigang housing complex dubbed "Wealthy Persons' New Town."”

2. 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”

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.””

   “As one executive put it: Now in the beverage market we are to a great extent very copycat.”

   “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.”

   “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.”

verb

1. (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[…]”

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