officiate
verb
Simple meaning
Perform duties attached to a particular office or place or function.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
uhfisheeaytSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
əˈfɪʃieɪt
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
verb
Perform duties attached to a particular office or place or function
“His wife officiated as his private secretary.”
intransitivetransitive
To perform the functions of some office.
intransitivetransitivesports
To serve as umpire or referee.
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- C2 · Proficient (estimated)
- Frequency
- Rare
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: Perform duties attached to a particular office or place or function
Used this way, officiate is a common word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It turns up most in ethics or values contexts.
“His wife officiated as his private secretary.”
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Common
- Connotation
- No strong connotation
- Usage feel
- Neutral and straightforward
Where it naturally appears
- Ethics/values
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
More ways to use officiate
- “Who officiated at your wedding?”verb
- “His wife officiated as his private secretary.”verb
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
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Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Inflected forms
Grammatical variations of the same word.
The act of umpiring.
Related Words
Connected to the same idea, not synonyms.
- weddingnoun
- ceremonynoun
- ordinationnoun
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.