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celebrity

nouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//sɪˈlɛb.ɹɪ.ti//
  • United States//səˈlɛb.ɹɪ.ɾi//

Fame, renown; the state of being famous or talked-about.

noun

  1. 1

    obsoleteA rite or ceremony.

  2. 2

    Fame, renown; the state of being famous or talked-about.

    Many of those that envy celebrities aspire to celebrity themselves.

  3. 3

    A person who has a high degree of recognition by the general population for his or her success or accomplishments; a famous person.

    "What do you put in your paper?" I asked, […] "Oh, news," said he, "and dull articles, and things about Celebrities. If you know any Celebrities, now?" Noël asked him what Celebrities were. "Oh, the Queen and the Princes, and people with titles, and people who write, or sing, or act—or do something clever or wicked."

    I liked the man for his own sake, and even had he promised to turn out a celebrity it would have had no weight with me. I look upon notoriety with the same indifference as on the buttons on a man's shirt-front, or the crest on his note-paper.

Etymology

From Middle English celebritē, from Old French celebrite (compare French célébrité), from Latin celēbritās.

Forms

plural
celebrities
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).