Idiom
dead ringer
Meaning
Someone or something that very closely resembles another; someone or something easily mistaken for another.
Meaning adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Examples
“That man is a dead ringer for my brother.”
“When she walked into the party, everyone stared because she was a dead ringer for a famous movie star.”
“I almost said hello to a stranger at the airport because he was a dead ringer for my old boss, right down to the glasses and the suit.”
“Although they were not related, the young actor was such a dead ringer for the historical figure that the director cast him immediately.”
Examples
simple
“That man is a dead ringer for my brother.”
contextual
“When she walked into the party, everyone stared because she was a dead ringer for a famous movie star.”
“I almost said hello to a stranger at the airport because he was a dead ringer for my old boss, right down to the glasses and the suit.”
complex
“Although they were not related, the young actor was such a dead ringer for the historical figure that the director cast him immediately.”
Origin
The expression is a late 19th-century compound of dead, used here to signify absolute precision, and ringer. The latter term referred to a horse of superior quality substituted surreptitiously for a slower one in a race to deceive bookmakers. It is related to the practice of ringing the changes, an 18th-century method of substituting counterfeit coins for genuine ones during a transaction. The term had settled into the sporting lexicon by the 1880s to denote any person or object providing an exact, and often fraudulent, resemblance to another.
Key words
Related idioms
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