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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
Scott Roxborough, HollywoodReporter, 29 Oct. 2025
Yeah Yeahs drummer Brian Chase as E Street’s Max Weinberg, and label impresario Jimmy Iovine as himself (that’s Iovine’s real voice screaming at Jon Landau over the phone) are a treat for rock fans.
—Joseph Hudak, Rolling Stone, 25 Oct. 2025
There's music impresario Bill Graham and William Randolph Hearst, the news tycoon.
—Chris Kenning, USA Today, 25 Oct. 2025
In the 1990s, the internet boom created overnight fortunes along with unforeseen challenges for some tech geeks and impresarios who founded wildly successful dot-coms.
—Christina Binkley, Robb Report, 11 Oct. 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 5 Nov. 2025.
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impresario
noun
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