Word of the Day

: January 14, 2024

cosplay

verb KAHZ-play

What It Means

To cosplay is to engage in the activity or practice of dressing up as a character from a work of fiction (such as a comic book, video game, or television show).

// Liz’s favorite part of attending Comic-Con is choosing a character to cosplay that few others will think of, then recreating their look as accurately as possible.

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cosplay in Context

“An educator for more than 20 years, [Heather] Trupia brought her love for the Star Wars franchise to the Hays CISD school in Niederwald, Texas, about 25 miles south of Austin. She wanted to excite kids about taking the state’s standardized STAAR test. This included cosplaying as Star Wars characters and performing shows for students.” — Kiko Martinez, MySanAntonio.com, 9 Nov. 2023

Did You Know?

If you enjoy cosplaying as your favorite anime character (say, Nezuko Kamada from Demon Slayer or Luffy from One Piece), you’ve got yourself a special, lexicographical twofer of words that were borrowed from English into Japanese and then back into English. In Japanese, anime is short for animēshiyon, which comes from the English word animation, referring to an animated cartoon. Japanese users similarly took the English words costume and play (as in role-play) and combined them into the word kosuchūmupurē, or kosupure for short, which was reborrowed into English as cosplay, first as a noun, and later as a verb. It's not required that one choose an anime character to cosplay, however—any fictional character will do, and probably has done! People are even starting to use cosplay figuratively to mean “to pretend to be,” as in “her chiweenie likes to cosplay as a much bigger dog whenever they visit the dog park.”