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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
Melissa Ruggieri,
USA Today,
23 June 2026
Clive Davis, the behind-the-scenes music-industry impresario who shepherded the careers of Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin, and more, is dead at 94.
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Jason P. Frank,
Vulture,
22 June 2026
Self-taught, Dillon spent his 20s living with the Los Angeles gallery impresario Patrick Painter, who introduced him to artists like Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy.
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Nate Freeman,
Vanity Fair,
12 June 2026
White is the latest impresario to profit enormously from the fascination that human beings have always had with watching other human beings fight.
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David Remnick,
New Yorker,
22 May 2026
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 Jun. 2026.
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impresario
noun
