One Idiom One Day: Dead ringer
She is a dead ringer of my friend Sue. I in fact walked up to her at an event mistaking her for Sue.
An exact duplicate; a substitute for something; an imposter
A ringer is a horse substituted for another of similar appearance in order to defraud the bookies. This word originated in the US horse-racing fraternity at the end of the 19th century. The word is defined for us in a copy of the Manitoba Free Press from October 1882:
"A horse that is taken through the country and trotted under a false name and pedigree is called a 'ringer.'"
It has since been adopted into the language to mean any very close duplicate. As a verb, 'ring' has long been used to mean 'exchange/substitute' in a variety of situations, most of them illegal. Dead, in the sense of lifeless, is so commonly used that we tend to ignore its other meanings. The meaning that's relevant here is exact or precise. This is demonstrated in many phrases; 'dead shot', 'dead centre', 'dead heat', etc. So, 'dead ringer' is literally the same as 'exact duplicate'.
E.g., The car that is parked in that garage is a dead ringer of the car that my dad used to own a couple of years back.
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