ranks

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of rank.

   The new officer rose quickly through the ranks.

   Thousands joined the ranks of the unemployed last year.

   Note

   One spelling covers every noun sense of rank: rows of soldiers, the numbered horizontal lines of a chessboard, sets of organ pipes, grades in a class-based society, and places in an ordered list. The plural can also mean the membership of a group, as when a football side has plenty of European experience in their ranks. There, ranks means the people within, not their order or arrangement.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of rank.

   The committee ranks each application by merit before the interview.

   He ranks among the best players in the league.

   Note

   The -s form shares its spelling with the plural noun, so the sentence decides which one you are reading: the verb follows a singular subject. It works both ways. Transitively, someone ranks applications; intransitively, a player ranks among the best. In US usage it can also mean outrank, taking the outranked person as its object. The obsolete adjective rank, meaning lush or coarse, never takes this ending.

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