Role

From French rÃ´le.

Full definition of role

(plural roles)

A character or part played by a performer or actor.
My neighbor was the lead role in last year's village play.
Her dream was to get a role in a Hollywood movie, no matter how small.
The expected behaviour of an individual in a society.
The role of women has changed significantly in the last century.
The function or position of something.
Local volunteers played an important role in cleaning the beach after the oil spill.
What rôle does the wax in your earhole fulfill?

2013, Katrina G. Claw, Rapid Evolution in Eggs and Sperm, In plants, the ability to recognize self from nonself plays an important role in fertilization, because self-fertilization will result in less diverse offspring than fertilization with pollen from another individual.

Designation that denotes an associated set of responsibilities, knowledge, skills, and attitudes
The project manager role is responsible for ensuring that everyone on the team knows and executes his or her assigned tasks.
(grammar): The function of a word in a phrase.

1984, David M. Perlmutter, Carol G. Rosen, Studies in relational grammar: Volume 2Examining these verbs one by one, what one finds is that Auxiliary Selection does correlate in the expected way with the two kinds of optional transitivity, confirming that with each predicate, one semantic role has a fixed link with initial 1-hood, another with initial 2-hood.