represent
verb
Simple meaning
To speak or act for someone else; also to stand for or be a sign of something.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
rehpruhzehntSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
ɹɛpɹəˈzɛnt
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
transitive
To stand or act in the place of; to perform the duties, exercise the rights, or otherwise act on behalf of
transitive
To portray to another using language; to show; to give one's own impressions and judgement of
transitive
To present again or anew; to present by means of something standing in the place of; to exhibit the counterpart or image of; to typify.
transitive
To give an account of; to describe.
transitive
To portray visually; to delineate
politicstransitive
To act as a representative of (a country, state, district etc.)
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- A2 · Elementary
- Frequency
- Common
- Typical Use
- Everyday English
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: To stand or act in the place of; to perform the duties, exercise the rights, or otherwise act on behalf of
Used this way, represent is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It turns up most in ethics or values contexts.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- No strong connotation
- Usage feel
- Neutral and straightforward
Where it naturally appears
- Ethics/values
Nearby words
- defend , a specialist term, precise but narrower
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
More ways to use represent
- “He represented this book as an example of the Russian 19th century novel.”verb
- “The flower represents a young girl.”verb
- “Ms. Smith will represent the defendant.”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.
Represented accurately or precisely.
Word family
Words built from the same root.
A presentation to the mind in the form of an idea or image.
Related words
Connected by subject or meaning, not by word formation.
A person who represents others.
Any basic cognitive process in which some entity comes to stand for or represent something else.
A numeration system in which a real number is represented by an ordered set of characters where the value of a character depends on its position.
A person employed to represent a business and to sell its merchandise (as to customers in a store or to customers who are visited).
Something visible that by association or convention represents something else that is invisible.
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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.