Word.ws English Dictionary

play doctor

play doctor noun: a professional who is called in to revise a play written by someone else.

Noun

play doctor (plural play doctors)

  1. A professional who is called in to revise a play written by someone else.
    • If Shakespeare lived to-day he would have waited four years to have his first comedy read and accepted—after which it would have been re-written by the stage carpenter and the leading lady and put on with interpolated songs and a costume chorus with a play doctor in the rear of the theater keeping...1912 July 19, The Evening Telegram, Elyria, Ohio

Verb

play doctor (third-person singular simple present plays doctor, present participle playing doctor, simple past and past participle played doctor)

  1. To pretend to be doctor and patient as a form of child play.
  2. (usually) To explore or sexually engage with another person's private parts, particularly in the context of roleplay of a medical nature.
    • […] Jimmie volunteered, […] "How can you have kids if you don't play doctor?"1931 October, R. L. Whitely, “Interviewing the Problem Boy”, in E. George Payne, editor, The Journal of Educational Sociology, volume V, number 2, Albany, page 99
    • By the time they are six, they may play doctor and take one another's rectal temperature or place objects into their orifices, […]1988, Lynn Leight, Raising Sexually Healthy Children, New York: Avon Books, published 1990, →ISBN, page 226

Forms of play doctor

Noun
pluralplay doctors
Verb
third-person singular presentplays doctor
present participleplaying doctor
past participleplayed doctor
pastplayed doctor

Questions about play doctor

What does play doctor mean?
Play doctor means a professional who is called in to revise a play written by someone else.
What part of speech is play doctor?
Play doctor can be a noun or a verb.
What is the plural of play doctor?
The plural of play doctor is play doctors.

Words near play doctor in the dictionary

  1. play Cupid
  2. play date
  3. play dates
  4. play dead
  5. play dirty
  6. play doctor
  7. play doctors
  8. play doggo
  9. play down
  10. play dumb
  11. play equipment

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: play doctor (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “play doctor.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/play_doctor. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.