imitating

present participle of imitate
1
as in emulating
to use (someone or something) as the model for one's speech, mannerisms, or behavior teenage musicians who imitate whichever rock stars are hot

Synonyms & Similar Words

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Example Sentences

Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to show current usage. Read More Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
Recent Examples of imitating The league immediately decided Juszczyk was imitating drinking beer. — Armando Salguero Outkick, FOXNews.com, 25 Sep. 2026 Rather than taking advantage of genuine quantum effects, Scholes proposes, life might be imitating them instead. — Elise Cutts, Quanta Magazine, 23 Sep. 2026 One year later, Clooney, 65, is back at the Venice Film Festival for a spin in the spotlight on the opening night for a bit of life imitating art. — Chris Gardner, HollywoodReporter, 2 Sep. 2026 Slop is formulaic and impersonal, the aggregate of everything that is already imitating everything else. — Becca Rothfeld, New Yorker, 29 Aug. 2026 Cohen created the character of Ali G for Channel 4’s The 11 O’Clock Show in 1998, playing a British suburbanite imitating urban, British Jamaican culture. — Glenn Garner, Deadline, 29 Aug. 2026 Even white people imitating Black people don’t talk like that anymore. — Alex Ritman, Variety, 28 Aug. 2026 For an industry watching this unfold, the lesson is not that scarcity marketing is a clever new tactic worth imitating everywhere. — Olivia Shalhoup, Forbes.com, 18 Aug. 2026 Philip Sidney’s brackets provided a blueprint for elevated expression, and writers loved imitating him. — Literary Hub, 18 Aug. 2026
Recent Examples of Synonyms for imitating
Verb
  • AeroSHARK achieves a similar effect by emulating nature's design.
    — New Atlas, New Atlas, 28 Sep. 2026
  • Any remote hopes of the tourists making any sort of comeback and perhaps emulating Sri Lanka, another weak side, in 2024 by winning the final Test after losing the series in England were thrown out of the window by their own board.
    — Paul Newman, New York Times, 9 Sep. 2026
Verb
  • The White House announced Arcade on social media with a series of animations parodying Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo loading screens.
    — Lou Kesten, Fortune, 5 Sep. 2026
  • Over two months, the protesters and their supporters – most who appeared to be digitally-savvy GenZ – used Instagram and Snapchat to connect, organize, and share countless reels parodying the government.
    — Omkar Khandekar, NPR, 2 Sep. 2026
Verb
  • But these genes still get copied every time the bacterium divides, and copying DNA costs energy.
    — Canan Karakoç, The Conversation, 28 Sep. 2026
  • People swivel-chair between them, copying information from emails, clicking through numerous interfaces and other tools.
    — Bryan Goode, Fortune, 26 Sep. 2026
Verb
  • The Taylor Compact Mirror from Fancii features a daylight-mimicking ring light that offers the perfect lighting for on-the-go touch-ups.
    — ABC News, ABC News, 26 Sep. 2026
  • Fusion with powerful magnets Fusion reactors aim to generate clean power by mimicking the sun’s process.
    — Aman Tripathi, Interesting Engineering, 25 Sep. 2026
Verb
  • Five times in the last two months, the president has sneered at and insulted female reporters, mocking their appearance or dismissing their credentials.
    — Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 29 Sep. 2026
  • In 2020, then-ESPN commentator Mark Jones shared posts mocking 49ers defensive end Nick Bosa after Bosa suffered a serious knee injury.
    — Bobby Burack OutKick, FOXNews.com, 24 Sep. 2026
Verb
  • Meanwhile several experts, independent of Schrottenloher, had launched an initiative aimed at reproducing Google’s result.
    — Manon Bischoff, Scientific American, 22 Sep. 2026
  • Its job is to go beyond producing a serviceable picture by interpreting and reproducing content.
    — New Atlas, New Atlas, 16 Sep. 2026
Verb
  • Some of the stories are just spoken matter-of-factly, while others are acted out with Jaku doing all the voices.
    — Christopher Arnott, Hartford Courant, 2 Oct. 2026
  • Anyone attempting to judge these works by their relationship to canonized video, computational art, and painting may have difficulty doing so.
    — Simon Denny, Artforum, 1 Oct. 2026
Verb
  • The stations are standardised, so capacity is added by replicating them, and this line is the blueprint for future local for local expansion, as per the release.
    — Prabhat Ranjan Mishra, Interesting Engineering, 27 Sep. 2026
  • My learning is more about understanding the mechanics of performance, the how, rather than replicating the why behind human emotions.
    — Corbin Bolies, Variety, 14 Sep. 2026

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Cite this Entry

“Imitating.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/imitating. Accessed 3 Oct. 2026.

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