referee

1. 1.

   be a referee or umpire in a sports competition

   Synonymsumpire

   Broaderjudge

   sport

2. 2.

   evaluate professionally a colleague's work

   Synonymspeer review

   Broaderreview

Other forms of referee

plural

referees·

past tense

refereed·

present participle

refereeing·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about referee

What does referee mean?

referee means "(sports) the chief official (as in boxing or American football) who is expected to ensure fair play". That is the primary sense; the word has 5 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in referee?

referee has 3 syllables: ref-e-ree. The stress falls on "ree". In IPA it is /ˌɹɛfɚˈi/.

What is another word for referee?

Close synonyms include ref, reviewer, reader, umpire, peer review. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is referee a common word?

referee is banded "Familiar" — widely understood, used when the subject calls for it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.

What rhymes with referee?

9 words rhyme with referee. Rhymes are matched on the phonemes from the last stressed vowel onward, which is the definition a reader has in their head.