: being a usually artificial and inferior substitute or imitation
ersatz turf
ersatz intellectuals
ersatznoun
Did you know?
Ersatz can be traced back in English to the 1870s, but it really came into prominence during World War I. Borrowed from German, where Ersatz is a noun meaning "substitute," the word was frequently applied as an adjective in English to modify terms like coffee (made from acorns) and flour (made from potatoes)—ersatz products resulting from the privations of war. By the time World War II came around, bringing with it a resurgence of the word along with more substitute products, ersatz was wholly entrenched in the language. Today, ersatz can be applied to almost anything that seems like an artificial imitation.
an apartment complex designed as an ersatz Mediterranean villa like everything else the restaurant served, the whipped cream on the dessert was ersatz
Recent Examples on the WebThese ersatz history tales do not inform our present condition but exacerbate it. Armond White, National Review, 24 Aug. 2022 The ersatz Hypersport has already reached a six-figure price on Bring a Trailer—not quite the original Lykan’s $3.6 million value, but still significant considering its convoluted provenance. Basem Wasef, Robb Report, 15 Aug. 2022 But in the end, NPCs are not ersatz people, brimming with spontaneous possibility.New York Times, 26 July 2022 There’s a premonition of Pop Art in this modus operandi (albeit the inverse of Warhol’s placement of ersatz Brillo boxes in a gallery). Jonathon Keats, Forbes, 11 July 2022 Our group, strangers molded into a temporal ersatz rowing team of six, were on the penultimate day of a weeklong sojourn run by Solitude River Trips on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. Lauren Mowery, Forbes, 5 July 2022 There are no arches, golden or otherwise, in the ersatz McDonald’s that opened Sunday in Moscow. Mary Ilyushina, Washington Post, 12 June 2022 Akin to antlers on end tables, the aesthetics of national parks are being used in an ersatz way, tailored to the rich. Antonia Hitchens, Town & Country, 8 June 2022 This amounts to a kind of malpractice in the editing room, transforming the actors’ brave and devoted exertions into a seeming cheat, an ersatz experience that might as well have been created with C.G.I. Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 26 May 2022 See More