personate

1. 1.

   pretend to be someone you are not; sometimes with fraudulent intentions

   “She posed as the Czar's daughter”

   Synonymsposeimpersonate

   Broaderdeceive

   Narrowermasquerade
2. 2.

   attribute human qualities to something

   “The Greeks personated their gods ridiculous”

   Synonymspersonify

   Broaderimpute

Other forms of personate

past tense

personated·

present participle

personating·

third person

personates·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about personate

What does personate mean?

personate means "pretend to be someone you are not; sometimes with fraudulent intentions". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in personate?

personate has 3 syllables: per-so-nate. The stress falls on "per".

What is another word for personate?

Close synonyms include pose, impersonate, personify. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is personate a common word?

personate is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.