Link Centre Dictionary

wannabe

wan·nabe

UK/ˈwɒnəbi/ US/ˈwɑnʌˌbi/ uncommon informal

noun

1.

an ambitious and aspiring young person

  • “a lofty aspirant”
  • “two executive hopefuls joined the firm”
  • “the audience was full of Madonna wannabes”
Synonyms

Origin

Written form of a reduction of want to be, analyzable as wanna + be. Wannabe can be considered a conversion, category change, or functional shift. While occasionally appearing in print, usually as a less reduced phrase, the popularity of the word took off in the mid-1980s following the Madonna wannabe fashion trend: “wannabe”, in Google Books Ngram Viewer.

Related words

Word family

Broader terms

WordNet 2.1 (Princeton University). Wiktionary (CC BY-SA). CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. WordNet 2.1 Copyright Princeton University. All rights reserved. Wiktionary content is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Licence.