impresario

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for April 6, 2025 is: impresario im-pruh-SAHR-ee-oh noun An impresario is a person who manages, puts on, or sponsors a performance or other entertainment, such as a concert, play, or sporting event. // The former heavyweight retired from the ring and later became a boxing impresario. [See the entry >](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/impresario) Examples: “When he stepped on stage during a comedy open mic at Castle Street spot The Barzarre in June of 2022, Louis Maynor, better known as Louis Tee, was mainly known as a producer, a hip-hop impresario who’d been staging shows and concerts around Wilmington since the late 1990s.” — John Staton, The Wilmington (North Carolina) Star-News, 21 Dec. 2023 Did you know? 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](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/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](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/impress) and impresario are not related. Impress is a descendant of the Latin verb pressare, a form of the word premere, meaning “to press.”