It's the Word of the Day for July 30th.
Today's word is doppelganger, spelled D-O-P-P-E-L-G-A-N-G-E-R.
There's an umlaut, or two dots, often seen above the A in doppelganger.
Doppelganger is a noun.
It's someone who looks very much like another person.
In literary use, doppelganger refers to a ghost that closely resembles a living person.
Here's the word used in a sentence from the New York Times by Amanda Hess.
When Timothee Chalamet himself briefly appeared at his own celebrity lookalike contest,
popping up between two of his doppelgangers,
the crowd was thrilled, but the contestants were somewhat diminished.
all of the discrepancies emphasized between his face and their own.
According to German folklore, all living creatures have an identical but invisible spirit double.
These second selves are distinct from ghosts, which appear only after death,
and are sometimes described as the spiritual opposite or negative of their living counterparts.
English speakers borrowed both the concept of the doppelganger and the German word for it,
doppel meaning double and ganger meaning goer, in the mid-1800s.
But today the English word typically has a more quotidian use,
referring simply to a living person who closely resembles another living person.
With your Word of the Day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.
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