dead ringer

plural dead ringers · alternative dead-ringer · alternative deadringer

1. idiomaticSomeone or something that very closely resembles another; someone or something easily mistaken for another.

   He is a dead ringer for his grandfather at that age.

   4 more examples

   Hey, er, anybody ever tell you you're a dead ringer for…

   1953, Dalton Trumbo, Ian McLellan Hunter, John Dighton, Roman Holiday, spoken by Irving Radovich (Eddie Albert)

   In 1987, in “The Rules of Attraction,” he wrote about casual sex and obsessive drug use among bored students of a dead ringer for Bennington College, which Mr. Ellis attended.

   2005 August 7, Edward Wyatt, “Bret Easton Ellis: The Man in the Mirror”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

   On our next date, she told me I could come back home if I wanted to. There was one condition, though: couples counseling.

   2008, Wally Lamb, The Hour I First Believed, Ch.1, at p.19

   Twentysomething Alice works in publishing, so is instantly in awe of this old man offering her chocolate with a trembling hand. He is world-famous writer Ezra Blazer, a dead ringer for Philip Roth, with whom Halliday had a relationship in her 20s.

   2018 February 28, Justine Jordan, “Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday review – a dizzying debut”, in The Guardian

   Synonyms: spitting image, double, doppelganger, lookalike