Definition of "roll"

roll¹

/ɹəʊl/

verb
third-person singular simple present rolls, present participle rolling, simple past and past participle rolled
1. (transitive) To cause to revolve by turning over and over; to move by turning on an axis; to impel forward by causing to turn over and over on a supporting surface.
  Quotations
  Huge Trunks of Trees, fell'd from the ſteepy Crown / Of the bare Mountains, rowl with Ruin down.
  1697, Virgil, “The Sixth Book of the Æneis”, in John Dryden, transl., The Works of Virgil: Containing His Pastorals, Georgics, and Æneis. […], London: […] Jacob Tonson, […], page 370, lines 267–268
2. (intransitive) To turn over and over.
  Quotations
  And her foot, look you, is fixed upon a spherical stone, which rolls, and rolls, and rolls.
  1599, William Shakespeare, “The Life of Henry the Fift”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, (please specify the act number in uppercase Roman numerals, and the scene number in lowercase Roman numerals)
  The gentleman aimed the ball once or twice and then threw it up the strand towards Cissy Caffrey but it rolled down the slope and stopped right under Gerty's skirt near the little pool by the rock.
  1922 February, James Joyce, “[Episode 1: Telemachus]”, in Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare and Company, […], part I [Telemachia], page 13
3. (intransitive) To tumble in gymnastics; to do a somersault.
4. (transitive) To wrap (something) round on itself; to form into a spherical or cylindrical body by causing to turn over and over.
5. (transitive) To bind or involve by winding, as in a bandage; to enwrap; often with up.
6. (intransitive) To be wound or formed into a cylinder or ball.
7. (ergative) To drive or impel forward with an easy motion, as of rolling.
8. (ergative) To utter copiously, especially with sounding words; to utter with a deep sound; — often with forth, or out.
9. (transitive) To press or level with a roller; to spread or form with a roll, roller, or rollers.
10. (intransitive) To spread itself under a roller or rolling-pin.
11. (ergative) To move, or cause to be moved, upon, or by means of, rollers or small wheels.
  Quotations
  We expressed our readiness, and in ten minutes were in the station wagon, rolling rapidly down the long drive, for it was then after nine. We passed on the way the van of the guests from Asquith.
  1897 December (indicated as 1898), Winston Churchill, chapter V, in The Celebrity: An Episode, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd.
  A “moving platform” scheme […] is more technologically ambitious than maglev trains even though it relies on conventional rails. Local trains would use side-by-side rails to roll alongside intercity trains and allow passengers to switch trains by stepping through docking bays.
  2013 June 1, “Ideas coming down the track”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8838, page 13 (Technology Quarterly)
12. (chiefly US, Canada, colloquial, intransitive) To leave or begin a journey.
13. (chiefly US, Canada, colloquial, intransitive) To compete, especially with vigor.
14. (transitive) To beat with rapid, continuous strokes, as a drum; to sound a roll upon.
15. (geometry) To apply (one line or surface) to another without slipping; to bring all the parts of (one line or surface) into successive contact with another, in such a manner that at every instant the parts that have been in contact are equal.
16. (transitive) To turn over in one's mind; to revolve.
17. (US, slang, intransitive) To behave in a certain way; to adopt a general disposition toward a situation.
  Quotations
  "This is how we roll in Spring Valley," one teen reportedly boasted.
  2006 November 21, Chris McKenna, “Kids at party chant as police sergeant is beaten by angry teens”, in Times Herald-Record‎, Middletown, NY, archived from the original on 16 May 2007
18. (dice games, intransitive) To throw dice.
19. (dice games, transitive) To roll dice such that they form a given pattern or total.
20. (roleplaying games) To create a new character in a role-playing game, especially by using dice to determine properties.
21. (intransitive, computing) To generate a random number.
22. (intransitive, aviation, nautical, of an aircraft or vessel) To rotate about the fore-and-aft axis, causing its sides to go up and down. Compare pitch.
23. (intransitive, in folk songs) To travel by sailing.
  Quotations
  We're homeward bound from the Arctic ground / Rolling down to Old Maui
  19th c., Rolling Down to Old Maui (anon.)
  Now we are ready to head for the Horn / Way-hey, roll and go!
  early 20th c., Randy Dandy-O (anon.)
24. (transitive) To beat up; to assault.
  Quotations
  Sometimes I'd roll a stray drunk, maybe steal a suitcase . . anything so I could make it till morning
  1990 June 10, Jan Herman, quoting Herbert Huncke, “The Beatnick's Beatnick”, in The New York Times‎
  They rolled him for his money, and that would have been that, but the guy tried to fight back.
  2006, Elizabeth Gaffney, Metropolis, page 422
25. (transitive, slang) To cause to betray secrets or to testify for the prosecution.
26. (intransitive, slang) To betray secrets.
27. (slang, intransitive) To be under the influence of MDMA (a psychedelic stimulant, also known as ecstasy).
  Quotations
  Cindy replied, “Wow, that’s great. Did you try E at those parties?” Steel said, “Oh yeah. I was rolling hard at the Willy Wonka party.”
  2000, Michael Sunstar, Underground Rave Dance‎, Writers Club Press, page 15
  The crowd was rolling on Ecstasy, and the lights enhanced the experience. […] He would use it to keep his teeth from chattering while he was rolling.
  2003, Karin Slaughter, A Faint Cold Fear, HarperCollins, page 169
  So the question is When you are rolling what gets you in that “ecstasy” state more: hard pounding energetic music or smoother and gentler music? Personally for me its gentler music because when I’m rolling my mind can’t really keep up with all the hard pounding intriquet sounds […]
  a. 2007, unidentified Internet user quoted in Joseph A. Kotarba, “Music as a Feature of the Online Discussion of Illegal Drugs”, in Edward Murguía et al. (editors), Real Drugs in a Virtual World: Drug Discourse and Community Online, Lexington Books (2007)
28. (transitive, intransitive, of a camera) To (cause to) film.
29. (transitive, soccer) To slip past (a defender) with the ball.
  Quotations
  So it was against the run of play that their London rivals took the lead two minutes before the interval through Drogba. He rolled William Gallas inside the area before flashing a stunning finish high past keeper Carlo Cudicini.
  2012 April 15, Phil McNulty, “Tottenham 1-5 Chelsea”, in BBC
  Rolled far too easily by Marc-Antoine Fortuné, Demichelis compounded his error by standing on the striker's foot. In the absence of the injured Watson, Gómez converted the penalty.
  2014 March 9, Jacob Steinberg, “Wigan shock Manchester City in FA Cup again to reach semi-finals”, in The Guardian
30. (intransitive) To have a rolling aspect.
  Quotations
  In this part of Warwickshire, the land rolls gently, so that, upon cresting a low rise or passing a copse of wind turbines, you suddenly spot a lot full of lorries or a complex of gigantic sheds.
  2019 November 21, Samanth Subramanian, “How our home delivery habit reshaped the world”, in The Guardian‎
31. (figurative, intransitive) To perform a periodical revolution; to move onward as with a revolution.
32. (intransitive) To move, like waves or billows, with alternate swell and depression.
33. (figurative, intransitive) to move and cause an effect on someone
  Quotations
  Here tell me, if thou darest, my conscious soul,what different sorrows did within thee roll?
  1718, Matthew Prior, Solomon On The Vanity Of The World
34. (intransitive) To make a loud or heavy rumbling noise.
35. (transitive) To utter with an alveolar trill.
36. (transitive, US) To enrobe in toilet-paper (as a prank or spectacle).
37. (transitive) To create a customized version of.
  Quotations
  Let's go through and outline how you might roll a kernel for a networked Linux machine you are using as your desktop machine and a file server for a network of Windows and Mac machines.
  2000, Mark F. Komarinski, Cary Collett, Red Hat Linux System Administration Handbook, page 311
  The clap in "Situation" is a standard Roland TR- 808 clap with a some compression and a bunch of reverb. But we can roll our own version using a soft synth and a have more flexibility, specifically in getting the extra decay for full "smash," as opposed to the short clap on Roland TR-808 and TR-909 drum machines.
  2006, Keyboard, volume 32, page 188
  For the second prototype's example, shown in Listing 5–64, we roll our own version of the Sum operator.
  2010, Joseph Rattz, Adam Freeman, Pro LINQ: Language Integrated Query in C# 2010, page 208
  We implement Cube_ as a special case of an N-dimensional array. Unfortunately, our need to efficiently Swap with lower-dimensional containers is not supported by the boost::multi_array template, so we must roll our own.
  2015, Hyer Thomas, Derivatives Algorithms - Volume 1: Bones (Second Edition), page 135
38. (transitive, martial arts) To engage in sparring in the context of jujitsu or other grappling disciplines.
39. (intransitive, shipping) To load ocean freight cargo onto a vessel other than the one it was meant to sail on.
noun
plural rolls
1. The act or result of rolling, or state of being rolled.
2. A forward or backward roll in gymnastics; going head over heels. A tumble.
3. Something which rolls.
  1. A heavy cylinder used to break clods.
  2. One of a set of revolving cylinders, or rollers, between which metal is pressed, formed, or smoothed, as in a rolling mill.
4. A swagger or rolling gait.
5. A heavy, reverberatory sound.
6. The uniform beating of a drum with strokes so rapid as scarcely to be distinguished by the ear.
7. (nautical, aviation) The oscillating movement of a nautical vessel as it rotates from side to side, about its fore-and-aft axis, causing its sides to go up and down, as distinguished from the alternate rise and fall of bow and stern called pitching; or the equivalent in an aircraft.
8. (nautical) The measure or extent to which a vessel rotates from side to side, about its fore-and-aft axis.
9. The rotation angle about the longitudinal axis.
10. An instance of the act of rolling an aircraft through one or more complete rotations about its longitudinal axis.
11. The act of, or total resulting from, rolling one or more dice.
12. A winning streak of continuing luck, especially at gambling (and especially in the phrase on a roll).
13. A training match for a fighting dog.
14. (US, paddlesport) An instance of the act of righting a canoe or kayak which has capsized, without exiting the watercraft, or being assisted.
15. (paddlesport) The skill of righting a canoe or kayak which has capsized, without exiting the watercraft, or being assisted.
16. (finance) Any of various financial instruments or transactions that involve opposite positions at different expiries, "rolling" a position from one expiry to another.

roll²

/ɹəʊl/

noun
plural rolls
1. That which is rolled up.
2. A document written on a piece of parchment, paper, or other materials which may be rolled up; a scroll.
  Quotations
  Busy angels spread / The lasting roll, recording what we say.
  1718, Matthew Prior, Solomon On The Vanity Of The World
3. An official or public document; a register; a record.
  Quotations
  As to the rolls of parliament, viz. the entry of the several petitions, answers and transactions in parliament. Those are generally and successively extant of record in the Tower
  1713 Sir M. Hale, The History of the Common Law of England (posthumously published)
4. (especially) one kept for official purposes.
  Quotations
  The roll and list of that army doth remain.
  c. 1666, John Davies, Historical Relations: Or, a Discovery of the True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Entirely Subdued, Nor Brought Under Obedience of the Crown of England Until the Beginning of the Reign of King James I
5. A quantity of cloth wound into a cylindrical form.
6. A cylindrical twist of tobacco.
7. A kind of shortened raised biscuit or bread, often rolled or doubled upon itself; see also bread roll.
8. (obsolete) A part; an office; a duty; a role.
  Quotations
  THE Methods of Government and of Humane Society, muſt be Preſerv’d, where Every Man has his Roll, and his Station Aſſign’d him ; and it is not for One Man to break in upon the Province of Another.
  1692, Roger L’Estrange, “[The Fables of Abstemius, &c.] Fab[le] CCCXI. A Son Singing at his Brothers Funeral.”, in Fables, of Æsop and Other Eminent Mythologists: […], London: […] R[ichard] Sare, […], page 273
9. A measure of parchments, containing five dozen.
  Quotations
  Parchement is sold by the dozen, and by the roll of five dozens.
  1882, James Edwin Thorold Rogers, A History of Agriculture and Prices in England, volume 4, page 594

Definition of "roll"

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noun

roll2

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roll¹

roll²