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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
Leo Barraclough, Variety, 24 Jan. 2025
Paul Hawthorne / Getty Images file JOHNNY CANALES, 77, TV host and impresario.
—Raul A. Reyes, NBC News, 28 Dec. 2024
Mayhem is a tug-of-war between genres, between pop and rock impresarios’ pet sounds — none more experienced on the job than the singer and producer herself.
—Craig Jenkins, Vulture, 11 Mar. 2025
His two-toned Rolls Royce also can be viewed here in this homage to one of the blues’ greatest impresarios.
—Gqlshare, Orange County Register, 19 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 8 Apr. 2025.
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impresario
noun
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