Macklemore

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An American hip hop artist and songwriter known for hits such as Thrift Shop and Can't Hold Us
2. A Seattle-based rapper whose stage name is Ben Haggerty and who rose to fame with a socially conscious style
3. The stage name of a Washington-born hip hop musician famous for songs like Same Love and Downtown

Etymology: Macklemore is a stage name, and the surname behind it is a real, if unusual, English one. The rapper Ben Haggerty, born in Seattle in 1983, took his name from his grandfather's family, and the stage name first appeared in the late 2000s as a deliberate play on his own identity rather than a coined word with an older history. Because it was chosen as a name rather than built from morphemes, there is no linguistic lineage to trace in the usual sense of a dictionary word. The most surprising thing about the name is how it became a noun. Proper names of people usually stay proper, but once a performer becomes famous enough, fans and journalists sometimes treat the name as a common label for a type of act, and "macklemore" has begun to be used in that way. Any such usage remains informal and is attested mainly in online and media contexts, so it should be read as nickname-driven rather than as an established dictionary sense.