Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun One who affects a particular attribute, attitude, or identity to impress or influence others.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun One who poses, or takes an attitude, physical or mental, which is assumed for effect; one who attitudinizes.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • A person who poses or attitudizes, esp. mentally.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun One who affects some behaviour, style, attitude or other condition, often to impress or influence others.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a person who habitually pretends to be something he is not

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[French, from poser, to pose, from Old French; see pose.]

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Examples

  • A poseur is someone who dresses like you, but doesn't know the difference between the words 'poser' and 'poseur.'

    Archive 2008-02-01 2008

  • The difference between a true scholar and a poseur is that true scholars are open about what they don't know and seek help from colleagues who are strong in those areas.

    Inferior medievalists Richard Nokes 2005

  • The difference between a true scholar and a poseur is that true scholars are open about what they don't know and seek help from colleagues who are strong in those areas.

    Archive 2005-07-01 Richard Nokes 2005

  • The word poseur has appeared in 10 Times articles over the past year, including in a December 11, 2009 theater review of "Love's Labors Lost" headlined

    NYT > Home Page By THE LEARNING NETWORK 2010

  • The word poseur has appeared in 10 Times articles over the past year, including in a December 11, 2009 theater review of "Love's Labors Lost" headlined

    NYT > Home Page 2010

  • I think that was all probably kind of childish and stupid but by this basic standard (a poseur is one who postures) isn’t the whole New Republic thing (with the exception of the unabashedly lib pieces) pretty much a national journal of poseurdom? joe from Lowell Says:

    Matthew Yglesias » Endgame 2010

  • January 21st, 2010 at 7: 04 pm tombaker says: i’m sure jeff skilling was thinking “they’d never let me take the fall” too. and he was an actual bigshot, not some vain poseur on a website.

    Think Progress » Will Scott Brown Stick By Birther Candidate Who Compared Obama To Osama Bin Laden? 2010

  • I suspect that Rich is disturbed that his matinee idol is suddenly being called a poseur by respectable people whom Rich might meet at a dinner party.

    John R. MacArthur: More and More, Obama Seems a Faux Liberal 2009

  • How often the woman or man with a God-given sense of the beautiful, the fitting, harmony between costume and setting, is described as poseur or poseuse by those who lack the same instinct.

    Woman as Decoration Emily Burbank

  • After all, the essence of the thing is to have simple, unaffected people; the poseur is the ruin of genial intercourse, unless he is

    The Upton Letters Arthur Christopher Benson 1893

Comments

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  • If you're going to spell poser poseur, spell loser loseur.

    July 11, 2009

  • That's a silly argument, you'll end up with things like ghoti.

    July 17, 2009

  • I totally took her advice

    July 17, 2009