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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

role.

A character or part played by a performer or actor.

4 characters2 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/ɹəʊl/Received-Pronunciation[ɹəʊɫ]Received-Pronunciation/ɹoʊl/Canada, General-American[ɹoʊɫ]Canada, General-American
  1. 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.
  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.
    What role does the wax in your earhole fulfill?
  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.
  5. The function of a word in a phrase.

  6. In the Raku programming language, a code element akin to an interface, used for composition of classes without adding to their inheritance chain.

Where this word comes from

From French rôle, from Middle French rolle, from Old French role, from Medieval Latin rotulus. Doublet of roll and rotulus.

noun/ɹəʊl/Received-Pronunciation[ɹəʊɫ]Received-Pronunciation/ɹoʊl/Canada, General-American[ɹoʊɫ]Canada, General-American
  1. An ancient unit of quantity, 72 sheets of parchment.

    historical
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.