the spitting image

A person who looks exactly like or bears a very strong resemblance to one. Wow, you are just the spitting image of your mother! I was about to call you by her name. That guy over there looks like the spitting image of someone I went to high school with.

If you say that one person is the spitting image of another, you mean that the first person looks exactly like the second. He is the spitting image of his father. Now Nina looks the spitting image of Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. Note: People occasionally use the spit and image or the dead spit to mean the same thing. Six-month-old Caleb is the spit and image of his daddy. He was handsome — the dead spit of Tikhonov, the film actor. Note: The origin of this expression is uncertain, but it may have developed from `spirit and image'. If one person was the spirit and image of another, they were alike both in character and physical appearance.

An exact resemblance, usually said of parent and child or other close relatives. This term comes from the earlier spit and image, which, since spit meant “likeness,” was redundant. Nevertheless, it was widely used from the late nineteenth century on, and by the mid-twentieth century, probably through mispronunciation or misspelling, was converted to the current cliché.