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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." (That verb is also the source of apprehend, comprehend, and prehensile.) English speakers were impressed enough with impresario to borrow it in the 1700s, at first using it, as the Italians did, especially of opera company managers. It should be noted that, despite their apparent similarities, impress and impresario are not related. Impress is a descendant of the Latin pressare, a form of the verb premere, which means "to press."
Examples of impresario in a Sentence
Mattie Kahn, New York Times, 23 Mar. 2024
The impresario of the croquet field was Jeremy Tate, the C.E.O. of the CLT.
—Emma Green, The New Yorker, 11 Mar. 2024
The Madison Avenue impresario, who once ran a media-buying operation and parlayed his experience there into a role as the ultimate go-between among ad agencies, big-spending clients and the media outlets that crave them, finds himself — at least for now — without a base of operations.
—Brian Steinberg, Variety, 13 Mar. 2024
Back in 2012, Michael, a budding Orange County legal weed impresario, and Mary, his housemate, were abducted and driven out to the desert.
—Daniel Fienberg, The Hollywood Reporter, 11 Mar. 2024
Written by Oscar winner Nancy Dowd (who ultimately took her name off the film) and directed by music impresario Lou Adler, the cast includes a young Diane Lane, Laura Dern and Ray Winstone alongside real-life rock-and-rollers Fee Waybill, Paul Simonon, Paul Cook and Steve Jones.
—Mark Olsen, Los Angeles Times, 8 Mar. 2024
In those videos, an evil impresario kidnaps and brainwashes an extra-terrestrial rock group, transforms them into prefabricated pop stars, brings them back to Earth and manipulates them to the top of the charts.
—Katie Bain, Billboard, 22 Feb. 2024
Randy Sparks, a creative impresario whose musical ensemble, the New Christy Minstrels, helped to jump-start the folk revival of the early 1960s and launched the careers of performers like John Denver, Steve Martin and Kenny Rogers, died on Sunday at an assisted-living facility in San Diego.
—Clay Risen, New York Times, 18 Feb. 2024
Tiffany also counted among his friends the impresario P.T. Barnum, whose knack for creating sensation had rubbed off on him.
—Robert Klara, Smithsonian Magazine, 15 Feb. 2024
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'impresario.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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Cite this Entry
“Impresario.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/impresario. Accessed 26 Apr. 2024.
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impresario
noun
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