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Concerts, music festivals, television series, professional wrestling matches—these are quite the undertakings. Luckily, there’s a word for the impressive individuals responsible for organizing and overseeing such productions: impresario. In the 1700s, English borrowed impresario directly from Italian, whose noun impresa means “undertaking.” (A close relative is the English word emprise, “an adventurous, daring, or chivalric enterprise,” which, like impresario, traces back to the Latin verb prehendere, meaning “to seize.”) At first English speakers used impresario as the Italians did, to refer to opera company managers, though today it is used much more broadly. It should be noted that, despite their apparent similarities, impress and impresario are not related. Impress is a descendant of the Latin verb pressare, a form of the word premere, meaning “to press.”
Examples of impresario in a Sentence
Caroline Frost, Deadline, 2 Mar. 2025
Desperate to stop their downward trajectory, the band hired future Sex Pistols impresario Malcolm McLaren to manage them.
—Daniel Kreps, Andy Greene
march 1, Rolling Stone, 1 Mar. 2025
Longtime soccer impresario Lee Stern is still on the board at 98.
—Jon Greenberg, The Athletic, 25 Feb. 2025
The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live follows the comedy impresario from childhood through to modern-day SNL, exposing fascinating behind-the-scenes stories of one of our most famous television institutions.
—Seija Rankin, The Hollywood Reporter, 18 Feb. 2025
See All Example Sentences for impresario
Cite this Entry
“Impresario.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/impresario. Accessed 18 Apr. 2025.
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impresario
noun
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