American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth
Edition - n. One that closely imitates or mimics another. - v.
To act as an imitator or mimic. - v. To imitate closely; mimic.
- adj. Closely imitating or following another: a copycat version
of a successful product; a copycat crime. - n. informal One who
imitates others' work without adding ingenuity. - adj.
Imitative; unoriginal. - v. To act as a copycat; to copy in a
shameless or derivative way GNU Webster's 1913 - n. someone who
copies the words or behavior of another. - n. someone who copies
the words or behavior of another - From copy + cat ("person").
It has been in use since at least 1896, in Sarah Orne Jewett's
The Country of the Pointed Firs. (Wiktionary) “One is that they
didn't want to give people ideas -- here's a new, neat, you
know, weapon you can build from the Internet, so we get a bunch
of people out there that are, to use the term copycat, who say,
you know, I'll do something similar.” “Of course, the term
copycat is too harsh a