Word.ws English Dictionary

roles

/ɹəʊlz/US/ɹoʊlz/

roles is the plural of role.

Meaning of role

Noun

role (plural roles)

  1. A character or part played by a performer or actor.
    • My neighbor was the lead role in last year's village play.
  2. The expected behaviour of an individual in a society.
    • The role of women has changed significantly in the last century.
  3. The function or position of something.
    • Local volunteers played an important role in cleaning the beach after the oil spill.
  4. 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.
    Synonyms:
    capacity
  5. 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
  6. (object-oriented programming) In the Raku programming language, a code element akin to an interface, used for composition of classes without adding to their inheritance chain.

See all 7 meanings of role

Proper noun capitalized: Roles

Roles

  1. A surname.

Words formed from roles

Phrases with roles

Words that rhyme with roles

Questions about roles

What does roles mean?
Roles means a surname.
What is roles the plural of?
Roles is the plural of role.
What part of speech is roles?
Roles is a proper noun.
How do you pronounce roles?
Roles is pronounced /ɹəʊlz/ (UK).

Words near roles in the dictionary

  1. roleplaying
  2. roleplaying game
  3. roleplaying games
  4. roleplayings
  5. roleplays
  6. roles
  7. Rolesville
  8. Rolette County
  9. rolex
  10. Rolexed
  11. rolexes

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: roles (page history and authors); Roles (page history and authors); role (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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-I learned some phrases-roles.wav.

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