wannabe.
Someone who wishes to be someone or do something, but lacks the qualifications or talent; an overeager amateur; an aspirant.
Meaning & usage
Someone who wishes to be someone or do something, but lacks the qualifications or talent; an overeager amateur; an aspirant.
Hollywood's restaurants are full of wannabe actors waiting to be discovered.
Someone who wishes to be part of, or to assimilate to, a majority group of which they are not a member.
Where this word comes from
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.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.