1606 S. Gardiner Bk. Angling 102 The Euangelist from God hath receiued such a rowle, it being inioyned him, to prepare the way of the Lord.

1692 R. L'Estrange Fables 281 The methods of Government and of humane Society must be preserved, where every man has his roll, and his station assigned him.

1791 R. Burns Let. 22 Apr. (2003) II. 88 I value the several Actors in the great Drama of Life, simply as they perform their Parts... As you, Sir, go thro' your Rôle with such distinguished merit, [etc.].

1800 Lady's Monthly Museum Jan. 8 Young in life, and forced to guess my roal, Without one friend to steer my bark from harm.

1824 Ld. Byron Don Juan: Canto XVI xcvi. 112 Juan..cast a glance On Adeline while playing her grand role.

1888 J. Bryce Amer. Commonw. I. xiv. 195 In order to support the rôle which they unconsciously fall into when talking to Europeans.

1913 A. Bennett Plain Man & his Wife ii. 36 His rôle is that of the brave, strong, patient victim of an alleged natural law.

1964 Negro Digest Feb. 72/2 Why is the Negro woman different?.. Why has her role been so crucial in the struggle for equality?

1997 D. Deida It's Guy Thing iv. 52 She has her role and he has his. ‘You are a woman, and I want you to act like one.’

a1731 D. Defoe Mrs. Christian Davies in Wks. (1883) IV. 497 The company who set me to play this roll, were highly diverted with the performance on all hands; but..I can't but believe the mock lord smelt a rat.

1858 J. G. Holland Titcomb's Lett. iii. 105 She was really very pretty, and took up her rôle with spirit and acted it admirably.

1886 Boston Globe 15 Aug. A grand production of ‘The Gladiator’, with that talented young tragedian..in the heroic title role.

1900 Westm. Gaz. 30 July 10/1 Mr. Chatterton revived the play [sc. Byron's ‘Manfred’] (in 1863) with Phelps in the title-rôle.

1912 M. B. Leavitt 50 Years Theatr. Managem. xiv. 184 Jennie Winston, an Australian, was likewise famous as a male impersonator and was also a favorite in leading operatic rôles.

1937 D. Frohman Encore xv. 199 In the course of his subsequent long career on the stage, he included in his repertoire more than a hundred and thirty difficult rôles.

1973 R. Roud in P. Noble Favorite Movies x. 103 In Citizen Kane..Welles does indeed play a role in his film.

1984 M. Westphal God, Guilt, & Death iii. 63 Freud would have gladly played the role of sonto a father who played his role better.

2006 New Yorker 23 Jan. 33/2 ‘There are only two TV roles I can play now’, White said. ‘Mommy McNoble or Mommy McCrazy’.

1856 Asylum Jrnl. Mental Sci. No. 20. 166 The rôle of the physician is to point out to the magistrate that which is disease and that which is not.

1874 H. C. Wood Treat. Therapeutics 435 As it is always employed in combination with other more active medicines..the rôle it plays is somewhat uncertain.

1895 E. A. Parkes Care Health 35 The rôle of these microbes is to disintegrate..organic bodies into simpler elements.

1944 J. S. Huxley On Living in Revol. 73 He [sc. Darwin] was aware that isolation might play a role in the production of new species.

1951 Amer. Sociol. Rev. 16 181/2 A policeman arresting a person is..performing or playing a role expected of one holding the position of public protector.

1963 J. Newson & E. Newson Patterns of Infant Care i. 21 One of the maternal grandmother's chief roles..is being steadily taken over by the doctor, the midwife and the health visitor.

1989 A. Storr Freud iv. 35 Poetry is a kind of human utterance in which symbol and metaphor play a predominant role.

2006 Herald-Times (Bloomington, Indiana) 22 Feb. a10/2 Sugars that attach themselves to large molecules inside the body and play a role in health and disease.

1893 Amer. Jrnl. Psychol. 5 513 Every one of his tragedies or comedies is a moral thesis, whose theme is nearly always woman, her moral nature, the rôle she plays and the rôle she should play in society.]

1902 Amer. Jrnl. Psychol. 13 329 This is not infrequent among women whose relatively passive role decreed by nature in love affairs has been exaggerated by society.

1913 G. H. Mead in Jrnl. Philos., Psychol. & Sci. Methods 10 377 We play the rôles of all our group; indeed, it is only in so far as we do this that they become part of our social environment.

1936 R. Linton Study of Man viii. 114 Every individual has a series of rôles deriving from the various patterns in which he participates and at the same time a rôle, general, which represents the sum total of these rôles.

1949 R. K. Merton Social Theory iii. 110 Individuals have multiple social roles and tend to organize their behavior in terms of the structurally defined expectations assigned to each role.

1967 J. M. Argyle Psychol. Interpersonal Behaviour iv. 73 By a ‘role’ is meant a pattern of behaviour which is shared by most occupants of a position, and which comes to be expected of them. The role usually includes a series of distinct relationships with people in other positions.

1977 R. Holland Self & Social Context v. 82 The possibility that psychologists' and sociologists' own roles may influence their definitions and uses of the concept of role.

2001 S. Stryker in J. H. Turner Handbk. of Sociol. Theory iii. xi. 218 Roles are the dynamic aspect of statuses, their associated rights and duties in action.

1961 Amer. Documentation 12 98 (heading) Notes on the use of roles and links in coordinate indexing.

1979 J. E. Rowley Mechanised In-house Information Syst. i. 46 Roles or role indicators are appended to an index term at the indexing stage to indicate the use of the term in that context.

1997 W. Sauerbrei & T. L. Diepgen in R. Klar & O. Opitz Classif. & Knowl. Organization vi. 536 Both languages have constructs to allow and to forbid the connection of two concept expressions by a role.

1954 J. W. Perry et al. in Amer. Documentation 5 21/1 In conducting the editing step, some of the relationships will be made explicit by the use of role indicators.

1960 Documentation Building Sci. Lit. 41 It is very difficult to..mesh your previous index with an index which does use role indicators and document subdivisions.

1976 Program 10 18 Prevulcanization is stripped to prevulcanis (a) to prevulcan (a) to vulcan (da): the letters within parentheses indicate the role indicator.

2005 P. Ingwersen & K. Järvelin Turn iv. 132 He also discussed..how index terms or class notations are related to each other, e.g., through role indicators, in order to express more complex semantic relationships.

1977 A. C. Foskett Subj. Approach to Information (ed. 3) vi. 81 When we have a thing defined by the material of which it is made, the thing precedes the material, which is introduced by the role operator.

2005 G. Flouris et al. in Y. Gil et al. Semantic Web: ISWC 2005 228 An additional advantage of the use of role operators..is the fact that they allow the definition of an axiom's negation.

1937 J. L. Moreno in Sociometry 1 51 The weaker the role absorption by the ego, the more often can the ego soliloquize.

2003 M. R. Leary & J. P. Tangney Handbk. Self & Identity 653/1 Wilkinson-Ryan and Westen..found identity disturbance to be a multidimensional construct consisting of four factors: role absorption,..painful incoherence,..inconsistency,..and lack of commitment.

1948 Social Forces 26 456/1 Sociological studies of personality and role conflict frequently locate the roots of neurosis in the generalized structure of the middle-class family.

1964 J. M. Argyle Psychol. & Social Probl. xiv. 169 People are often exposed to role-conflicts, usually between the demands of different roles, such as how much time to devote to the job or family, sometimes to complexities in the position, as in the case of the military chaplain.

1995 P. A. Tyler in C. Hollin Contemp. Psychol. vi. 120 Stressors come in a variety of guises: illness or death of a relative..role conflict (e.g. between being a good husband or wife and a good employee) or physical stressors like heat.

1943 Amer. Sociol. Rev. 8 329/2 The functions for the writer are roughly equivalent to the functions for the reader, although there may be a certain amount of boy-girl role differentiation.

1972 J. M. Argyle Social Psychol. of Work viii. 180 Role-differentiation appears in small social groups, as division of labour appeared in the earliest human communities.

2005 Canad. Jrnl. Educ. 28 445 The members of this governance team..struggled with role differentiation, and, during the critical decision in dealing with the Harry Potter books, they appeared to disregard this role separation.

1961 E. Goffman Encounters 93 This ‘effectively’ expressed pointed separateness between the individual and his putative role I shall call role distance... The individual is actually denying not the role but the virtual self that is implied in the role.

1979 Internat. Jrnl. Sociol. of Law 7 289 Not that the average performer seems conscious of any evidence on his part of role-distance; on the contrary, such ritual commitment furnishes the core of his identity.

2003 Ethics 114 166 Adopting Erving Goffman's notion of role distance, Dan-Cohen suggests that the role the official occupies may be a component of his self or it may be one that he does not identify with.

1972 M. L. Samuels Linguistic Evol. vii. 146 R. B. Le Page suggests to me that in England there would be good reasons for the aristocracy of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries to adopt affected forms of speech as a means of ‘role-distancing’ from the lower classes, from whom they had hitherto been differentiated by speaking French.

1945 Sociometry 8 234/3 When does role-expectation pressure on a given person outweigh the pressure that one person can exert on the group?

2000 D. Popenoe in M. S. Kimmel & A. Aronson Gendered Society Reader 151 A new set of role expectations for marriage and marital gender roles can be established which is adapted to the new conditions of modern life.

1936 S. G. Cole in Jrnl. Relig. 17 (1937) 310 Social bonds in a family having six or seven children become so involved that ‘normally inclusive role-relations are difficult, if not impossible of performance’.

1961 Jrnl. Sci. Stud. Relig. 1 61/1 The material for this report is drawn from a larger study of the role relations of ministers and psychiatrists in the Religio-Psychiatric Movement.

2005 Social Psychol. Q. 68 175/1 If role relations are to continue smoothly, each person must act to verify not only his or her own role identity, but also those of the others in the particular social setting.

1940 Sociometry 3 20 We are coining a new term, ‘cultural atom’, since we know of no other which expresses this peculiar phenomenon of rôle relationships.

1957 E. Bott Family & Social Network i. 3 A role-relationship is defined as those aspects of a relationship that consist of reciprocal role expectations of each person concerning the other.

1994 S. Romaine Lang. in Society ii. 43 A domain is an abstraction which refers to a sphere of activity representing a combination of specific times, settings, and role relationships.

1941 Monogr. Soc. Res. Child Devel. 6 179 Frustration fantasy: Stick used..for playing out ascendant role-reversals between E and S, in dramatic play relating to framed and unframed nursery school situations.

1967 J. M. Argyle Psychol. Interpersonal Behaviour x. 188 Role-reversal: here a trainee takes the reverse of the role he would take in real life, e.g. a foreman takes the role of a shop-steward.

1998 Zest Sept. 119/3 After all, we've seen a role reversal in the workplace, why shouldn't we now aim to do the same in sport?

1956 W. J. Goode in Amer. Sociol. Rev. 21 653/1 The post divorce adjustmental process..is one by which a disruption of role sets and patterns, and of existing social relations, is incorporated into the individual's life pattern.

1957 R. K. Merton in Brit. Jrnl. Sociol. 8 110 Each social status involves not a single associated role, but an array of roles. This basic feature of social structure can be registered by the..term, role-set... By role-set I mean that complement of role-relationships in which persons are involved by virtue of occupying a particular social status.

1999 P. D. Hutcheon Building Char. & Culture vii. 132 Her precise ‘role set’ will be different from that of any of her hiking companions, even though theirs are likely to be similarly complex.

1958 Amer. Sociol. Rev. 23 460 His concern with the psychology of role strain occasionally leads him to stereotyped writing about ‘the’ worker's role and an emphasis on fatigue, frustration, and impoverished social relations.

1977 R. Holland Self & Social Context v. 178 Courses which depend on departmental co-operation and finance are particularly conducive to role-strain.

2002 Managem. Today (Nexis) 14 Mar. 20 Role strain is also observed in the workplace—if a job description isn't clearly spelled out, you can find yourself playing boss and employee at the same time.

1972 Jrnl. Social Psychol. 88 247 The ability to role-take accurately, or empathize, is the ability to see, feel, respond, and understand as if one were the other person.

2008 B. Maxwell Professional Ethics Educ. vi. 139 The ability to role-take and imagine the impact of one's actions on others may be a precondition of the possibility of moral agency as such.

1933 Jrnl. Philos. 30 579 Emphasis was laid upon Mead's doctrines of experience as social, of the importance of ‘rôle-taking’, and of metaphysical thinking as the most generalized form of rôle-taking.

1951 Amer. Sociol. Rev. 16 180/2 The term role-taking meant, for Mead, a strictly mental or cognitive or empathic activity, not overt behavior or conduct.

2000 R. B. Darling Partnership Model in Human Services iv. 76 Role-taking can be problematic in client-professional interaction, because the backgrounds of clients and professionals often differ.

1976 Program 10 24 The presence of the connective merely ensures that the first word in the multi-word phrase is roled and stored.

1995 G. Dobbie & R. Topor in T. W. Ling et al. Deductive & Object-oriented Databases 274 We describe the declarative semantics of roled programs... We define a priority relation that is used to identify preferred models of a program.

1976 Program 10 14 (heading) A minicomputer retrieval system with automatic root finding and roling facilities.