/ɹɪˈfɜː/, /ɹɪˈfɝ/, /ɹɪˈfɛr/
OriginFrom Middle English referren, from Old French referer, from Latin referre. The noun (used in journalism) is from the verb. Doublet of relate. See also infer, collate and confer, delate and defer, as well as prelate and prefer among others.
- transitiveTo direct the attention of (someone toward something)
“The shop assistant referred me to the help desk on ground floor.”
- transitiveTo submit to (another person or group) for consideration; to send or direct elsewhere.
“He referred the matter to the principal.”
“The doctor may refer patients to a psychiatrist.”
“I'll refer the objections back to management for reconsideration.”
- transitiveTo place in or under by a mental or rational process; to assign to, as a class, a cause, source, a motive, reason, or ground of explanation.
“He referred the phenomena to electrical disturbances.”
- intransitiveTo mention (something); to direct attention (to something)
“To explain the problem, the teacher referred to an example in another textbook.”
“Her counsel has complained of the charge of the judge, as unprecedented, an innovation on our rules of practice, misconstructive of the true meaning of the law, and referring to laws not applicable to”
“She became disrespectfully referred to locally as the "Crab" on account of her extraordinary manoeuvrability.”
- intransitive, stativeTo make reference to; to be about; to relate to; to regard; to allude to.
“The recipe referred to several unusual ingredients.”
- To be referential to another element in a sentence.
- intransitiveTo point to either a specific location in computer memory or to a specific object.
“In C, the pointer obtained by &a refers to the variable a.”
“Hence, the precise number of bytes to which the pointer refers to is not known. The compiler must know the number of bytes to which a pointer refers to in order to apply dereference operation”
- transitiveTo require to resit an examination.
“Smith's marks in the finals were unsatisfactory and he was referred.”
- intransitiveTo have the meaning of, to denote.
“The nickname "Big Apple" refers to the city of New York.”
“In programming, a "memory leak" refers to a situation where memory is or stays unnecessarily allocated.”
“The basic idea is that two sets A and B have the same cardinality if there is a bijection from A to B. Since the domain and range of the bijection is not relevant here, we often refer to a bijection f”
- A blurb on the front page of a newspaper issue or section that refers the reader to the full story inside the issue or section by listing its slug or headline and its page number.
“A refer on page 1 of the Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2015, edition of The Herald-News contained incorrect information about the story “Neighbors at odds over Joliet liquor license” that appeared on Page 4 of the”
“Looking at the refers on page 2, it's obvious that May became something of an accidental women's issue.”
“The paper of Sept. 11 was not without its alarms. On Page One, an ominous “refer” (pronounced reefer) to an article inside the paper: Palestinian snipers had killed two Israelis, bringing a retaliator”
Formsrefers(present, singular, third-person) · referring(participle, present) · referred(participle, past) · referred(past) · refers(plural)