also wan·na·bee n.

1. One who aspires to a role or position.
2. One who imitates the behavior, customs, or dress of an admired person or group.
3. A product designed to imitate the qualities or characteristics of something.

adj.

Wishing or aspiring to be; would-be.

[Alteration of want to be.]

Origin: 1981

We live in an age not of heroes but of wannabes. Or so it seemed in the early 1980s, when wannabe evolved from slang question to mocking answer.

Wannabe came from the polite "What do you want to be?" reduced to a quick spoken "Whaddaya wannabe?" And the answer, as early as 1981, was "a wannabe." At least it seemed that way to a less-than-thrilled older generation of achievers. Wannabe was used not by the wannabes themselves but by those who watched and found them lacking.

Surfers were among the first to be stung by the wannabes. In 1981, Newsweek reported, "Before long the beaches were jammed with hordes of novices known as wannabees (as in, 'I wanna be a surfer')." A 1987 article in the Illustrated London News explained, "What bothers surfers is that only a quarter of that money is being spent on surfboards. The rest is spent by people surfers call 'wanna bes.' They don't surf but they want to, so they dress the part, as have non-participating fans of tennis and skiing."

Other writers mentioned a witch-burner wannabe, a Bedouin wanna-be, a Christian wannabe, and Roman wannabees, to take examples just from 1989.

Another kind of wannabe imitated a personality rather than an activity. Depending on age, gender, and proclivity, a young person might wannabe, for example, a Madonna wannabe, a Rambo wannabe, an Arnold (Schwarzenegger) wannabe, an Annie (from the musical of that name) wannabe, a Johnny (Carson) wannabe, or an Elvis wannabe. (Last names generally aren't needed.) In an age of celebrities rather than heroes, wannabes need only make themselves into look- alikes (1947). It is enough to copy the clothes, hairstyles, and mannerisms of their Role Models (1957).

There are also people who really want the job: would-begang members and governors, parents and commodities traders. As long as they remain candidates, observers can smile at them as wannabes.

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(also, more plausibly, spelled wannabe) [from a term recently used to describe Madonna fans who dress, talk, and act like their idol; prob.: originally from biker slang] A would-be hacker. The connotations of this term differ sharply depending on the age and exposure of the subject. Used of a person who is in or might be entering larval stage, it is semi-approving; such wannabees can be annoying but most hackers remember that they, too, were once such creatures. When used of any professional programmer, CS academic, writer, or suit, it is derogatory, implying that said person is trying to cuddle up to the hacker mystique but doesn't, fundamentally, have a prayer of understanding what it is all about. Overuse of terms from this lexicon is often an indication of the wannabee nature. Compare newbie.

Historical note: The wannabee phenomenon has a slightly different flavor now (1993) than it did ten or fifteen years ago. When the people who are now hackerdom's tribal elders were in larval stage, the process of becoming a hacker was largely unconscious and unaffected by models known in popular culture — communities formed spontaneously around people who, as individuals, felt irresistibly drawn to do hackerly things, and what wannabees experienced was a fairly pure, skill-focused desire to become similarly wizardly. Those days of innocence are gone forever; society's adaptation to the advent of the microcomputer after 1980 included the elevation of the hacker as a new kind of folk hero, and the result is that some people semi-consciously set out to be hackers and borrow hackish prestige by fitting the popular image of hackers. Fortunately, to do this really well, one has to actually become a wizard. Nevertheless, old-time hackers tend to share a poorly articulated disquiet about the change; among other things, it gives them mixed feelings about the effects of public compendia of lore like this one.

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - opkomling, snob

Français (French)
n. - personne qui joue/qui rêve de devenir une star/un footballeur etc

Deutsch (German)
n. - (schlechter) Imitator

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - επίδοξος, άτομο που φιλοδοξεί να μοιάσει σε κάποιον

Italiano (Italian)
scimmiotto

Português (Portuguese)
n. - pessoa (f) pretenciosa

Русский (Russian)
стремящийся к чему-л.

Español (Spanish)
n. - persona que trata de emular a alguien que admira, aspirante

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - aspirerande, blivande

中文（简体） (Chinese (Simplified))
希望大家接受他的人, 想达到目标但不一定有希望达到者

中文（繁體） (Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 希望大家接受他的人, 想達到目標但不一定有希望達到者

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 동경하는 것과 같이 되고 싶어하는 사람, ~의 숭배자

日本語 (Japanese)
abbr. - want to be

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮רוצה להיות, שואף להידמות ל-‬

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