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Concerts, music festivals, television series, professional wrestling matches—these are quite the undertakings. Luckily, there’s a word for the impressive individuals responsible for organizing and overseeing such productions: impresario. In the 1700s, English borrowed impresario directly from Italian, whose noun impresa means “undertaking.” (A close relative is the English word emprise, “an adventurous, daring, or chivalric enterprise,” which, like impresario, traces back to the Latin verb prehendere, meaning “to seize.”) At first English speakers used impresario as the Italians did, to refer to opera company managers, though today it is used much more broadly. It should be noted that, despite their apparent similarities, impress and impresario are not related. Impress is a descendant of the Latin verb pressare, a form of the word premere, meaning “to press.”
Examples of impresario in a Sentence
Molly Fischer, New Yorker, 5 May 2025
But the impresario of the flower show is not much of a gardener.
—James Barron, New York Times, 1 May 2025
But Carl Hagenbeck, a German animal trader and entertainment impresario, had a different vision of what zoos could be.
—Shoshi Parks, Smithsonian Magazine, 20 June 2025
Melton partnered with Wayne Johnson and Tony Perry, two nightlife impresarios who had already transformed D.C.’s after-dark culture.
—Kimberly Wilson, Essence, 17 June 2025
See All Example Sentences for impresario
Cite this Entry
“Impresario.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/impresario. Accessed 22 Jul. 2025.
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impresario
noun
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