role
UK/ɹəʊl//ɹoʊl/
role noun: a character or part played by a performer or actor.
Noun (1)
role (plural roles)
- A character or part played by a performer or actor.
- My neighbor was the lead role in last year's village play.
- Her dream was to get a role in a Hollywood movie, no matter how small.
- The expected behaviour of an individual in a society.
- The role of women has changed significantly in the last century.
- The function or position of something.
- Local volunteers played an important role in cleaning the beach after the oil spill.
- What role does the wax in your earhole fulfill?
- Designation that denotes an associated set of responsibilities, knowledge, skills, or privileges
- The project manager role is responsible for ensuring that everyone on the team knows and executes his or her assigned tasks.
- As students all over the United States knuckle down to learning, the rumble of war drums once more proclaims Mars high man in Europe. Discarding morbid curiosity, every student should consider it vitally necessary to get a general picture of the causes, movements, and possible effects of World War...1939 November 10, “Following The War”, in The Chart, volume I, number 1, Joplin, Missouri: Joplin Junior College, page 4, column 1
- Synonyms:
- capacity
- The function of a word in a phrase.
- Examining these verbs one by one, what one finds is that Auxiliary Selection does correlate in the expected way with the two kinds of optional transitivity, confirming that with each predicate, one semantic role has a fixed link with initial 1-hood, another with initial 2-hood.1984, David M. Perlmutter, Carol G. Rosen, Studies in relational grammar: Volume 2
- In the Raku programming language, a code element akin to an interface, used for composition of classes without adding to their inheritance chain.
Noun (2)
role (plural roles)
- An ancient unit of quantity, 72 sheets of parchment.
role meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi and Urdu
role in Hindi
- character or part
- भूमिका bhūmikā
- the expected behavior of an individual in a society
- भूमिका bhūmikā
- the function or position of something
- भूमिका bhūmikā
role in Tamil
- character or part
- பங்கு paṅku
role in Marathi
- भूमिका, भूमिकेला
role in Urdu
- character or part
- کِرْدار kirdār
More languagesFewer languages
- role in Bengali
- ভূমিকা bhumika
- role in Telugu
- పాత్ర pātra
- role in Malayalam
- വേഷം vēṣaṁ, അവതാരം avatāraṁ
- role in Kannada
- ಕೆಲಸ, ಪಾಂಗು
- role in Punjabi
- ਭੂਮਿਕਾ
- role in Gujarati
- ભૂમિકા
- role in Odia
- ଭୂମିକା, ଭୂମିକାଃ
- role in Assamese
- গুৰি guri
- role in Pashto
- رول rol, نقش naqš
- role in Arabic
- دَوْر dawr
- role in Malay
- peranan
- role in Indonesian
- peranan, peran, tugas
- role in Thai
- บทบาท bòt-bàat
- role in Vietnamese
- vai, vai trò
- role in Myanmar
- အခန်း a.hkan:
Examples of role in a sentence
- His face fit his roles: now smiling, now earnest, now glowering, now raging.
- The actor's pride was wounded when the leading role went to his rival.
- The study focused on the role of plankton in the food chain.
Synonyms of role
Forms of role
| plural | roles |
|---|---|
| alternative form (dated) | rôle |
Origin of role
From French rôle, from Middle French rolle, from Old French role, from Medieval Latin rotulus. Doublet of roll and rotulus.
Words formed from role
- bit role
- breeches role
- gender role
- gender-role
- massively multiplayer online role-playing game
- multirole
- pants role
- play a role
- rerole
- role activity diagram
- role-based
- role conflict
- roled
- roleless
- role model
- role-oriented
- role-oriented language
- roleplay
- role-play
- role player
- role-player
- roleplayer
- role-playing
- role-playing game
- role playing game
- role-playing video game
- role reversal
- thematic role
- theta role
- title role
- trouser role
Phrases with role
- role play
- role plays
- role models
- role played
- plays a role
- role players
- role playing
- played a role
- role playings
- playing a role
- role conflicts
- role reversals
2 more phrasesFewer phrases
Words that rhyme with role
47 more rhymesFewer rhymes
- parole
- toll
- dole
- goal
- patrol
- swole
- bricole
- condole
- mole
- noel
- whole
- stroll
- bole
- knoll
- shoal
- carmagnole
- foal
- pistole
- prole
- Seoul
- stole
- thole
- Tyrol
- baklol
- cajole
- console
- decontrol
- dhole
- droll
- extol
- extrasystole
- gnoll
- hop pole
- indol
- kohl
- memorial pole
- micromole
- mol
- Nicole
- nole
- ole
- parasystole
- schizocoel
- schizocoele
- sowl
- square peg in a round hole
- vole
Questions about role
- What does role mean?
- Role means a character or part played by a performer or actor.
- What is role in Hindi?
- Role in Hindi is भूमिका (bhūmikā). See Role meaning in Hindi.
- What part of speech is role?
- Role is a noun.
- How do you pronounce role?
- Role is pronounced /ɹəʊl/ (UK).
- What is the plural of role?
- The plural of role is roles.
Words near role in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: role (page history and authors); role (Marathi, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); അവതാരം (Malayalam) (page history and authors); role (Kannada Wiktionary) (page history and authors); role (Punjabi, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); role (Gujarati, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); role (Odia, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); গুৰি (Assamese) (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.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-role.ogg, LL-Q1860 (eng)-Ajshul-role.wav.
Cite this entry: “role.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/role. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.