Word.ws English Dictionary

role-play

role-play is the alternative form of roleplay.

Meaning of roleplay

Verb

roleplay (third-person singular simple present roleplays, present participle roleplaying, simple past and past participle roleplayed)

  1. (intransitive) To act out a scenario or fantasy with another person or other people.
    • To spice up their sex life, they like to roleplay.
  2. (transitive) To act as a character as part of a fantasy, especially with a group.
    • He likes to roleplay a vampire.
  3. (intransitive, transitive) To act out a social role, especially one that one does not truly belong to.
    • He talks like he's some scrappy bootstrap entrepreneur but he's just some old money rich kid roleplaying.

See all 5 meanings of roleplay

Forms of role-play

Verb
third-person singular presentrole-plays
present participlerole-playing
past participlerole-played
pastrole-played
Noun
pluralrole-plays

Questions about role-play

What is role-play the alternative form of?
Role-play is the alternative form of roleplay.

Words near role-play in the dictionary

  1. role-model
  2. role-models
  3. role-oriented
  4. role-oriented language
  5. role-oriented languages
  6. role-play
  7. role-played
  8. role-player
  9. role-players
  10. role-playing
  11. role-playing game

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: role-play (page history and authors); roleplay (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: “role-play.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/role-play. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.