Roll

How to spell roll

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce roll

What does roll mean?

1. verbTo move along a surface by turning over and over, or to cause something to do so.
2. nounA small rounded portion of bread baked individually.
3. nounAn official list or register of names.

Roll in a sentence

• verb

  The loose marble began to roll across the kitchen floor.

• noun

  She buttered a warm roll to go with the soup.

• noun

  The teacher called the roll before the lesson started.

• verb

  Workers had to roll the heavy steel drum up the ramp.

• noun

  The bakery sells a crusty roll for breakfast each morning.

• noun

  His name was finally added to the electoral roll.

Where does roll come from?

Language of origin: French

Roll travelled into English from the Old French verb roller, meaning 'to turn over and over', which itself grew out of the Latin rotulare, 'to revolve' or 'to turn like a small wheel'. That Latin verb was built on rotulus, a 'little wheel', the diminutive of rota, the ordinary Latin word for a wheel. English adopted it in the 1300s, at first for the literal turning motion and for a rolled-up sheet of parchment, which is exactly why a written list of names is still called a 'roll' (and why we 'enrol' students and call out a 'roll-call'). From the rolled-up sense came the small rounded loaf of bread, since the dough is rolled before baking. The everyday spelling trap is purely that roll sounds identical to 'role', the part an actor plays, even though that word came by a quite separate route through French rolle for the rolled script an actor read from.

How the word is built

• roll (single root from Old French roller / Latin rotulare 'to turn like a wheel'); no prefix or suffix

Words that sound like roll

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• role: The function, part, or position that a person or thing has in a particular situation.