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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
Maureen Lee Lenker, EW.com, 19 May 2025
Known by various names through the years -- Puffy, Puff Daddy, P. Diddy, Diddy and Love -- Combs became a rap impresario in the 1990s, launching the careers of Mary J. Blige, Usher and the Notorious B.I.G. and lending his hip-hop credentials to the songs of Mariah Carey and Jennifer Lopez.
—Aaron Katersky, ABC News, 5 May 2025
The movie perks up when Michael Keaton and Eva Green arrive as a ruthless impresario and his sensitive acrobat girlfriend, and Burton envisions his obvious Disneyland analog as a capitalist hellscape.
—Josh Bell, Vulture, 21 Mar. 2025
Miami classical music impresario and lawyer Julian Kreeger, who died Nov. 22 at 84 after a long series of medical issues and surrounded by family and friends, advanced that composer’s skill, his sons David and Daniel said.
—Howard Cohen, Miami Herald, 4 Mar. 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 29 May. 2025.
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impresario
noun
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