Other forms: wannabes
A wannabe is somebody trying to be like a person they admire. A wannabe rock star, wannabes at the door, a wannabe politician.
It is always dismissive, and it says the person has the manner without the substance. It is a written form of want to be, which is unusual: most such spellings stay in dialogue, and this one became a noun in its own right in the 1980s.
1nounwannabeSomebody trying to be like a person they admire.
“The club was full of rock-star wannabes with dyed hair and leather trousers.”
wannabe is a person.
A written form of want to be, which became a noun in American English in the 1980s.
Written form of a reduction of want to be, analyzable as wanna + be. Wannabe can be considered a conversion, category change, or functional shift. While occasionally appearing in print, usually as a less reduced phrase, the popularity of the word took off in the mid-1980s following the Madonna wannabe fashion trend:
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA