refer
Language: English
Part of speech: verb
Pronunciation: ipa: /ɹɪˈfɜː/
enpr: rī-fûr
ipa: /ɹɪˈfɝ/
ipa: /ɹɪˈfɛr/
ipa: /ɹəˈføː/
note: Liverpool, fair–fur merger
ipa: /ɹɪˈfeː/
note: Humberside, Teesside, fair–fur merger
ipa: /ɹɪˈfɛː/
note: Lancashire, fair–fur merger
ipa: /ɹɪˈfɜː(ɹ)/
rhymes: -ɜː(ɹ)
ipa: /ˈɹiːfə/
ipa: /ˈɹifɚ/
ipa: /ˈɹiːfə/
homophone: reefer
rhymes: -iːfə(ɹ)
Forms: form: refers
form: referring
form: referred
form: referred
Etymology: From 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.
Senses: examples: text: The shop assistant referred me to the help desk on ground floor.
glosses: To direct the attention of (someone toward something)
examples: text: He referred the matter to the principal.
text: The doctor may refer patients to a psychiatrist.
text: I'll refer the objections back to management for reconsideration.
synonyms: send
glosses: To submit to (another person or group) for consideration; to send or direct elsewhere.
examples: text: He referred the phenomena to electrical disturbances.
glosses: To 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.
examples: text: To explain the problem, the teacher referred to an example in another textbook.
text: 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 the sale.
ref: 1854, Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Louisiana, page 444:
text: She became disrespectfully referred to locally as the "Crab" on account of her extraordinary manoeuvrability.
ref: 1956 February, R. C. Riley, “The Lymington Railway and Isle of Wight Ferry”, in Railway Magazine, page 82:
text: A provision of law may not be construed as requiring a new grant to be awarded to a specified non-Federal Government entity unless that provision of law (1) specifically refers to this subsection; specifically identifies the particular non-Federal Government entity involved; and (3) specifically states that the award to that entity is required by such provision of law in contravention of the policy set forth in subsection (a).
ref: 1994, Congress of the United States, United States Statutes at Large, volume 108, part 4:
text: All hanar have two names. The Face Name is known to the world; the Soul Name is kept for use among close friends and relations. Hanar never refer to themselves in the first person in conversation with someone they know on a Face Name basis. To do so is considered egotistical, so instead they refer to themselves as "this one", or the impersonal "it".
ref: 2008, BioWare, Mass Effect, Redwood City: Electronic Arts, →ISBN, →OCLC, PC, scene: Hanar Codex entry:
text: Nonetheless, for many years afterward, she was often referred to as maharani, though that eventually gave way to the less glamorous but more respectful title of rajmata, the equivalent of queen mother.
ref: 2009 July 31, Bruce Weber, “Gayatri Devi, 90, a Maharani and a Lawmaker, Dies”, in The New York Times:
glosses: To mention (something); to direct attention (to something)
examples: text: The recipe referred to several unusual ingredients.
glosses: To make reference to; to be about; to relate to; to regard; to allude to.
topics: grammar
human-sciences
linguistics
sciences
glosses: To be referential to another element in a sentence.
examples: text: In C, the pointer obtained by &a refers to the variable a.
text: 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
ref: 2010 September 24, Ajay Mittal, Programming In C: A Practical Approach, Pearson Education India, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 201:
topics: computing
engineering
mathematics
natural-sciences
physical-sciences
programming
sciences
info_templates: extra_data: words: to
expansion: [with to]
glosses: To point to either a specific location in computer memory or to a specific object.
examples: text: Smith's marks in the finals were unsatisfactory and he was referred.
topics: education
glosses: To require to resit an examination.
examples: text: The nickname "Big Apple" refers to the city of New York.
text: In programming, a "memory leak" refers to a situation where memory is or stays unnecessarily allocated.
text: 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 from A to B as a bijection between the sets, or a one-to-one correspondence between the elements of the sets.
ref: 2013, William F. Basener, Topology and Its Applications, unnumbered page:
glosses: To have the meaning of, to denote.
raw_tags: of a term or name
Synonyms: delegate
direct
Derived terms: cross-refer
refer to
refer someone to
refer someone to the reply given in Arkell v Pressdram
Related terms: reference
referral
relate
relation
relationship
relative