''cameo'' ▫ᴱᴺ Entries

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''cameo'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260220114507-00-⌔

cameo - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

cameo (plural cameos or cameoes or camei)

• A piece of jewelry, etc., carved in relief.
  • ✤ Aarfy’s buxom trollop had vanished with her smutty cameo ring, and Nurse Duckett was ashamed of him because he had refused to fly more combat missions and would cause a scandal.¹
  • ✤ SIMONE: And he tracked down Mom’s cameo —the one Dad pawned? He outbid fourteen other buyers on eBay.²
• A single very brief appearance, especially by a prominent celebrity in a movie or song.
  • ✤ Famous comic book writer Stan Lee had a cameo in the Spider-Man movie. He was on screen for perhaps ten seconds, but aficionados distinctly remember him.
  • ✤ As they turned into Hertford Street they startled a robin from the poet’s head on a barren fountain, and he fled away with a cameo note.³
  • ✤ Southgate will have been delighted to give Foden the first of many England caps while Greenwood will also have enjoyed his taste of international action during his cameo after coming on as a substitute for Kane.⁴
  • ✤ Dr. Helen O’Connell, Australia’s first female urologist, recalled that in her own medical training, the clitoris barely made a cameo.⁵

Verb

cameo (third-person singular simple present cameos, present participle cameoing, simple past and past participle cameoed)

• To appear in a cameo role.

Etymology

Borrowed from Italian cammeo, from Medieval Latin camaeus, of unknown origin. The movie sense is short for “cameo role” referring to a famous person who was playing no character, but him or herself. Like a cameo brooch — a low-relief carving of a person’s head or bust — the actor or celebrity is instantly recognizable. More recently, it has come to refer to any short appearances, whether as a character or as oneself. Doublet of camaieu.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA: /ˈkæm.iː.əʊ/
• Audio (Southern England): 🔊
• (General American) IPA: /ˈkæm.i.oʊ/
• Audio (US): 🔊

Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

1. 1961 November 10, Joseph Heller, “The Eternal City”, in Catch-22 […], New York, N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, →OCLC, page 433: ↩

2. 2014, Molly Smith Metzler, Elemeno Pea, →ISBN, page 66: ↩

3. 1922, Michael Arlen, “Ep./4/2”, in “Piracy”: A Romantic Chronicle of These Days: ↩

4. 2020 September 5, Phil McNulty, “Iceland 0-1 England”, in BBC Sport ‎${}^{[1]}$: ↩

5. 2022 October 17, Rachel E. Gross, “Half the World Has a Clitoris. Why Don’t Doctors Study It?”, in The New York Times ‎${}^{[2]}$: ↩

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