refer

Verb

refer (third-person singular simple present refers, present participle referring, simple past and past participle referred)

1. (transitive) To direct the attention of (someone toward something).
   • The shop assistant referred me to the help desk on ground floor.
2. (transitive) To submit to (another person or group) for consideration; to send or direct elsewhere.
   • He referred the matter to the principal.
   • The doctor may refer patients to a psychiatrist.

   Synonyms:

   send

3. (transitive) To place in or under by a mental or rational process; to assign to, as a class, a cause, source, a motive, reason, or ground of explanation.
   • He referred the phenomena to electrical disturbances.
   • The Nandi of British East Africa tell a story in which the origin of death is referred to the ill-humour of a dog, who brought the tidings of immortality to men, but, not being received with the deference due to so august an embassy, he changed his tune in a huff and doomed mankind to the sad fate...1918, James George Frazer, Folk-Lore In The Old Testament, volume 1, page 54
4. (intransitive) To mention (something); to direct attention (to something).
   • To explain the problem, the teacher referred to an example in another textbook.
   • Her counsel has complained of the charge of the judge, as unprecedented, an innovation on our rules of practice, misconstructive of the true meaning of the law, and referring to laws not applicable to the sale.1854, Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Louisiana, page 444
5. (intransitive, stative) To make reference to; to be about; to relate to; to regard; to allude to.
   • The recipe referred to several unusual ingredients.
6. To be referential to another element in a sentence.
7. (intransitive) To point to either a specific location in computer memory or to a specific object.
   • In C, the pointer obtained by &a refers to the variable a.
   • Hence, the precise number of bytes to which the pointer refers to is not known. The compiler must know the number of bytes to which a pointer refers to in order to apply dereference operation2010 September, Ajay Mittal, Programming In C: A Practical Approach, Pearson Education India, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 201
8. (transitive) To require to resit an examination.
   • Smith's marks in the finals were unsatisfactory and he was referred.
9. (intransitive) To have the meaning of, to denote.
   • The nickname "Big Apple" refers to the city of New York.
   • In programming, a "memory leak" refers to a situation where memory is or stays unnecessarily allocated.
10. (transitive) To cause (pain) to be felt elsewhere.
    • Inferior head refers pain to the TMJ area and the superior head refers pain to the zygomatic area.2021, Ravikiran Ongole et al., Textbook of Oral Medicine, Oral Diagnosis and Oral Radiology, page 206
    • The gluteus medius and minimus muscles are important hip abductors […] TrPs in these muscles may produce local pain … or may refer pain down the posterior or lateral thigh and leg …2015, César Fernández-de-las-Peñas, Joshua Cleland, Jan Dommerholt, Manual Therapy for Musculoskeletal Pain Syndromes, page 726
11. To apparently relocate; to be felt in another place than where it is actually caused.
    • Pain from the hip often refers to the knee.2007, Donald E. Greydanus, Arthur N. Feinberg, Dilip R. Patel, The Pediatric Diagnostic Examination, page 316

Noun

UK/ˈɹiːfə/US/ˈɹifɚ/

refer (plural refers)

1. A blurb on the front page of a newspaper issue or section that refers the reader to the full story inside the issue or section by listing its slug or headline and its page number.
   • A refer on page 1 of the Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2015, edition of The Herald-News contained incorrect information about the story “Neighbors at odds over Joliet liquor license” that appeared on Page 4 of the same edition.2015 August 5, “Corrections”, in The Herald-News, Joliet, Illinois: Shaw Media, via Issuu, page 2
   • Looking at the refers on page 2, it's obvious that May became something of an accidental women's issue.2017 May, Amanda May Aruani, “Letter from the Editor”, in The Arts Paper, New Haven, Connecticut: The Arts Council of Greater New Haven, via Issuu, archived from the original on 12 Sep 2021, page 3