Word.ws English Dictionary

role playing

role playing is the alternative form of roleplaying.

role playing is the present participle and gerund of role play.

Meaning of roleplaying

Noun

roleplaying (usually uncountable, plural roleplayings)

  1. (usually) Action in which a person takes on a role (as that of an actor) and acts out being that character.
    • But perhaps the most interesting aspect of roleplaying’s development has been the emergence of the “story-game” movement: a passionate community of independent designers using games to explore new themes and approaches to storytelling.2017 February 8, Owen Duffy, “Monsterhearts: 'A lot of queer youth are made to feel monstrous by people around them'”, in Katharine Viner, editor, The Guardian, London: Guardian News & Media, →ISSN...

Forms of role playing

pluralrole playings

Questions about role playing

What is role playing the alternative form of?
Role playing is the alternative form of roleplaying.

Words near role playing in the dictionary

  1. role models
  2. role play
  3. role played
  4. role player
  5. role players
  6. role playing
  7. role playing game
  8. role playing games
  9. role playings
  10. role plays
  11. role reversal

Source and license

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