Personation
noun ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The act of personating: the playing of a role or portrayal of a character countable, uncountable
- 2 acting the part of a character on stage; dramatically representing the character by speech and action and gesture wordnet
- 3 The roles or characters so played countable, uncountable
"It struck him abruptly that a woman whose only being was to "make believe," to make believe that she had any and every being that you liked, that would serve a purpose, produce a certain effect, and whose identity resided in the continuity of her personations, so that she had no moral privacy, as he phrased it to himself, but lived in a high wind of exhibition, of figuration—such a woman was a kind of monster, in whom of necessity there would be nothing to like, because there would be nothing to take hold of."
- 4 imitating the mannerisms of another person wordnet
- 5 The act of voting in an election by impersonating someone else. UK, countable, uncountable
Example
More examples"It struck him abruptly that a woman whose only being was to "make believe," to make believe that she had any and every being that you liked, that would serve a purpose, produce a certain effect, and whose identity resided in the continuity of her personations, so that she had no moral privacy, as he phrased it to himself, but lived in a high wind of exhibition, of figuration—such a woman was a kind of monster, in whom of necessity there would be nothing to like, because there would be nothing to take hold of."
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.