refer

verb
/ɹɪˈfɜː/UK/ɹɪˈfɝ/CA/ɹɪˈfɛr//ˈɹiːfə/UK/ˈɹifɚ/CA

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.

  1. derived from referre
  2. derived from referer
  3. inherited from referren

Definitions

  1. To direct the attention of (someone toward something)

    • The shop assistant referred me to the help desk on ground floor.
  2. To submit to (another person or group) for consideration

    To submit to (another person or group) for consideration; to send or direct elsewhere.

    • He referred the matter to the principal.
    • The doctor may refer patients to a psychiatrist.
    • I'll refer the objections back to management for reconsideration.
  3. To place in or under by a mental or rational process

    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.

    • He referred the phenomena to electrical disturbances.
  4. + 9 more definitions
    1. To mention (something)

      To mention (something); to direct attention (to something)

      • To explain the problem, the teacher referred to an example in another textbook.
      • 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.
      • She became disrespectfully referred to locally as the "Crab" on account of her extraordinary manoeuvrability.
    2. To make reference to

      To make reference to; to be about; to relate to; to regard; to allude to.

      • The recipe referred to several unusual ingredients.
    3. To be referential to another element in a sentence.

    4. To point to either a specific location in computer memory or to a specific object.

      • In C, the pointer obtained by &a refers to the variable a.
      • 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
    5. To require to resit an examination.

      • Smith's marks in the finals were unsatisfactory and he was referred.
    6. To have the meaning of, to denote.

      • The nickname "Big Apple" refers to the city of New York.
      • In programming, a "memory leak" refers to a situation where memory is or stays unnecessarily allocated.
    7. To cause (pain) to be felt elsewhere.

      • Inferior head refers pain to the TMJ area and the superior head refers pain to the zygomatic area.
    8. To apparently relocate

      To apparently relocate; to be felt in another place than where it is actually caused.

      • Pain from the hip often refers to the knee.
    9. A blurb on the front page of a newspaper issue or section that refers the reader to the…

      A blurb on the front page of a newspaper issue or section that refers the reader to the full story inside the issue or section by listing its slug or headline and its page number.

      • A refer on page 1 of the Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2015, edition of The Herald-News contained incorrect information about the story “Neighbors at odds over Joliet liquor license” that appeared on Page 4 of the same edition.
      • Looking at the refers on page 2, it's obvious that May became something of an accidental women's issue.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

A definitional loop anchored at refer. Each word in the ring is defined by the next; follow the chain far enough and it folds back on itself. Scroll to it and watch.

01refer02consideration03ground04soil05growth06adversity07adverse08interests09persons

A definitional loop anchored at refer. Each word in the ring appears in the definition of the next; follow the chain far enough and it folds back on itself.

9 hops · closes at refer

curated · pre-corpus. live cycle detection across the full graph is the next major milestone.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA