0 past simple and past participle of ape
1 to copy something or someone badly and unsuccessfully:
He called the new building unoriginal and said that it merely aped the classical traditions.
And yet, in many respects, relationships between nuns and male clergy aped relationships between married women and men.
They were depicted as ambitious upstarts who crudely aped noble manners; their liminal status between the pure types of noble and commoner made them appear repulsively "mongrelized" (p. 25).
The westernized nouveaux riches aped the colonists.
Our privatisation programme is aped around the world, to continue my somewhat dubious metaphor.
I am also fearful that involvement by the supermarkets could well be aped by smaller discount shopping chains and by newsagents.
We set up the colleges of advanced technology because of that, but to some extent they, too, aped the university world, although not all of them have done so.
The corporate methods of developing our new and expanded towns need to be adapted—not aped—and applied to the problems of urban renewal in the old areas.
