Word of the Day
: July 30, 2025doppelgänger
playWhat It Means
A doppelgänger is someone who looks very much like another person. In literary use, doppelgänger refers to a ghost that closely resembles a living person.
// I saw your doppelgänger at the movies yesterday and almost waved hello before I realized they weren’t you.
// In one of the creepiest parts of the story, the main character is haunted by a doppelgänger.
doppelgänger in Context
“When [Timothée] Chalamet himself briefly appeared at his own [celebrity look-alike] contest, popping up between two of his doppelgängers, the crowd was thrilled, but the contestants were somewhat diminished, all of the discrepancies emphasized between his face and their own.” — Amanda Hess, The New York Times, 22 Nov. 2024
Did You Know?
According to German folklore, all living creatures have an identical, but invisible, spirit double. These second selves are distinct from ghosts, which appear only after death, and are sometimes described as the spiritual opposite or negative of their living counterparts. English speakers borrowed both the concept of the doppelgänger and the German word for it (from doppel-, meaning “double,” and -gänger, meaning “goer”) in the mid-1800s, but today the English word typically has a more quotidian use, referring simply to a living person who closely resembles another living person.
