anybody who is anybody
- idiom
- Informal
:
cualquiera que sea importante
- When the new club opened, anybody who is anybody wanted to be seen there.
Examples
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You can expect anybody who is anybody in the tech industry to attend.
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At the gala, anybody who is anybody was present.
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At the annual awards ceremony, anybody who is anybody was in attendance.
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If anybody who is anybody supports the project, it will likely succeed.
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At the annual awards ceremony, anybody who is anybody was in attendance.
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If anybody who is anybody supports the project, it will likely succeed.
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You can expect anybody who is anybody in the tech industry to attend.
Synonyms
1
2.5
An important person who is well known in a field
Antonyms
Surface Forms
Morphology
The individual words are transparent, but the overall meaning ('the important or influential people') is not directly compositional from a literal reading of the repeated phrase. The repetition and pragmatic inference give a clue (people who truly 'count'), and similar patterns exist cross-linguistically, so a learner might guess the sense but would not reliably derive it without prior exposure.
Etymology
Anybody who is anybody plays on the idea of 'being somebody', meaning a person who is important. Imagine a room where every person who matters is present, so Anybody who is anybody means 'all the important people'.