staff

1. 1.

   provide with staff

   “This position is not always staffed”

   Broaderprovide

   Narrowerman
2. 2.

   serve on the staff of

   “The two men staff the reception desk”

   Broaderserve

Other forms of staff

plural

staffs·

past tense

staffed·

present participle

staffing·

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 staff

What does staff mean?

staff means "personnel who assist their superior in carrying out an assigned task". That is the primary sense; the word has 8 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in staff?

staff has 1 syllable: staff. In IPA it is /ˈstæf/.

What is another word for staff?

Close synonyms include faculty, stave. 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 staff a common word?

staff is banded "Core" — among the few thousand words that carry most english. 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 staff?

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