Etimology
From French rôle, from Middle French rolle, from Old French role, from Medieval Latin rotulus. Doublet of roll and rotulus.
noun
role (plural roles)
A character or part played by a performer or actor.
The expected behaviour of an individual in a society.
The function or position of something.
Designation that denotes an associated set of responsibilities, knowledge, skills, and attitudes
(grammar) The function of a word in a phrase.
(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.
Examples
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 role of women has changed significantly in the last century.
Local volunteers played an important role in cleaning the beach after the oil spill.
What role does the wax in your earhole fulfill?
In plants, the ability to recognize self from nonself plays an important role in fertilization, because self-fertilization will result in less diverse offspring than fertilization with pollen from another individual.
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 II. The average U. S. citizen's knowledge of World War II will probably decide his role in it.
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.
Related words
hyponyms
subrole
noun
role (plural roles)
(historical) An ancient unit of quantity, 72 sheets of parchment.