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say it: REF-ur-uhns
reference is a noun and verb meaning "a remark that calls attention to something or someone". It is pronounced /ˈɹɛfɚəns/ — REF-ur-uhns. It carries 11 recorded senses.
a remark that calls attention to something or someone
“she made frequent mention of her promotion”
“there was no mention of it”
“the speaker made several references to his wife”
a short note recognizing a source of information or of a quoted passage
“the student's essay failed to list several important citations”
“the acknowledgments are usually printed at the front of a book”
“the article includes mention of similar clinical cases”
an indicator that orients you generally
“it is used as a reference for comparing the heating and the electrical energy involved”
a book to which you can refer for authoritative facts
“he contributed articles to the basic reference work on that topic”
a formal recommendation by a former employer to a potential future employer describing the person's qualifications and dependability
“requests for character references are all too often answered evasively”
the most direct or specific meaning of a word or expression; the class of objects that an expression refers to
“the extension of `satellite of Mars' is the set containing only Demos and Phobos”
the act of referring or consulting
“reference to an encyclopedia produced the answer”
a publication (or a passage from a publication) that is referred to
“he carried an armful of references back to his desk”
“he spent hours looking for the source of that quotation”
(computer science) the code that identifies where a piece of information is stored
computer science
the relation between a word or phrase and the object or idea it refers to
“he argued that reference is a consequence of conditioned reflexes”
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.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for reference come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.