offsides
adjective
Simple meaning
Illegally beyond a prescribed line or area or ahead of the ball or puck.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
awfsydzSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
ˈɔfsaɪdz
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.
adjective
Illegally beyond a prescribed line or area or ahead of the ball or puck
“The touchdown was nullified because the left tackle was offside.”
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- C2 · Proficient (estimated)
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
This meaning: Illegally beyond a prescribed line or area or ahead of the ball or puck
Used this way, offsides is a specialist word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It turns up most in technical or specialist writing contexts.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Specialist/technical
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Specialized
- Connotation
- Clinical and technical
- Usage feel
- Technical and specialized
Where it naturally appears
- Technical/specialist writing
Usage note
In general conversation this sense usually needs explaining — outside its field, people reach for a plainer word.
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
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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 mistake of occupying an illegal position on the playing field (in football, soccer, ice hockey, field hockey, etc.).
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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.