roman
- 1Belonging to, coming from, or relating to the Roman Empire.
Roman legions guarded the northern frontier for centuries.
Archaeologists found the remains of a Roman villa beneath a farm in southern England.
Note
The word reaches well beyond the city the empire was named for: a road in a far province or a villa on the frontier is as Roman as anything in the capital. It describes the ancient state, its people and its works, which is why it fills talk about the past, as in Roman law, Roman roads and Roman coins.
- 2Coming from, belonging to, or relating to the city of Rome.
The film follows a Roman family through one long, sweltering August.
Roman restaurants are known for simple pasta dishes like carbonara and cacio e pepe.
- 3A person born in or living in the Roman Empire.
A wealthy Roman often owned a house in town and a villa in the country.
The Romans adopted many gods from the peoples they conquered.
- 4A person born in Rome or living there.
Ask a Roman where to find the best carbonara and you'll get a long answer.
Many Romans escape the city in August, when the heat is at its worst.
Note
Today's Romans share the name with two older peoples, the ancient empire's people and the medieval Romans of Constantinople. Dates and places in the sentence usually settle which is meant: Romans who escape the city's August heat are modern, while Romans who guard a northern frontier are ancient.
- 5Relating to the Roman Catholic Church or to the Holy See.
The parish celebrates Mass according to the Roman rite rather than an Eastern one.
The council's decrees could not be published until the Roman authorities had approved them.
Similarpapal
- 6Of text or characters, relating to the Latin alphabet or to roman numerals.
The keyboard switches between Cyrillic and roman characters with a single key.
Chapter headings use roman numbering, while the pages use ordinary digits.
SimilarLatin
Note
Typography and computing often write it lowercase, as in roman characters and roman numerals, though Roman numerals and the Roman alphabet are common with a capital too. It classifies a script or a number system, so it takes no more or most: a character is roman or it is not.
- 7Belonging to an architectural style marked by large, bold round arches and vaults, and by baths, aqueducts, basilicas, amphitheaters, and similar buildings.
The station's Roman concourse, roofed with a vast barrel vault, was modeled on an ancient bathhouse.
Unlike the pointed arches of Gothic churches, Roman arches are perfectly round.
Note
Everything grows from the round arch: run it along a passage and it becomes a barrel vault, cross two and you have a cross vault, turn it about its center and it becomes a dome. Those shapes let Roman builders roof great spaces, which is why baths, basilicas and amphitheaters define the style.
- 8Of type or a font: upright, rather than slanted as italic or oblique type is.
Foreign words are set in italic, but loanwords as common as café stay roman.
The editor switched the punctuation after the title back to roman type.
Similarupright
Oppositeitalic, italicized, oblique, slanted
Note
Running text is set roman by default, and italic is the marked choice for emphasis, titles and foreign words; some early printed Bibles switched from roman to italic to mark quoted text. Inside a passage that is already italic the convention flips, and a title goes back to roman so that it still stands out.
- 9One of the three main styles of type for the Latin alphabet, alongside italic and blackletter, in which the ascenders are mostly straight.
The type designer spent two years drawing a roman and a matching italic.
The foundry's catalog offered a dozen romans but only two blackletters.
Note
A typeface family is usually built around its roman, with an italic drawn to match; the roman sets the proportions and the other styles follow. Beside its two companions it is the plain one: italic leans and echoes handwriting, blackletter is broken and angular, and roman stands upright with rounder, more open shapes. As a count noun it names one design, so a foundry can offer a dozen romans.
- 10The Latin script, the alphabet in which English and many other languages are written.
Many Hindi speakers text each other in Roman rather than Devanagari.
The road signs give the town's name in Inuktitut syllabics and in Roman.
Note
Script and typeface are easy to confuse here: a name written in Roman uses only Latin letters, while text set in the upright typeface is merely not italic. And what the script lacks, a record cannot hold: the Northwest Territories government allowed only the Roman alphabet on official documents, so a baby named Sahaiʔa had Sahai'a on her birth certificate, the ʔ swapped for an apostrophe.
- 11Said before a number in speech to show that it is written as a Roman numeral rather than an Arabic one.
Counsel, please turn to subsection Roman four on page twelve.
The professor told the class to skip ahead to Roman two in the outline of the statute.
Note
A citation like article 2(ii) loses its shape when read aloud, so lawyers and judges say Roman two to keep the numeral apart from a plain 2. It is a word for the ear, at home in courtrooms and meetings, and it comes right before the number: the end of Roman one, Schedule B, Roman three. On the page the numeral itself does the job.
- 12Short for roman numeral.
Front-matter pages are numbered in lowercase roman, and the main text starts again at 1.
On the spines, each volume number is set as a roman, from I through XII.
Note
The short form belongs mainly to American typesetting and is uncommon outside it; elsewhere people say roman numerals in full. It works as a count noun for a single numeral (a roman, two romans) and as a mass noun for the system itself, as when front matter is numbered in lowercase roman.
- 13Having a dignified, noble face that shows little expression.
Through the whole sentencing he kept a Roman face, dignified and utterly unreadable.
He stood before the committee looking quite Roman, noble and perfectly unmoved.
Note
Noble composure can be praised with it or gently mocked. In Letitia Elizabeth Landon's Ethel Churchill (1837), a man who announces that to feel he ought to do a thing is to do it ends up "looking quite Roman with excess of virtue". It sits naturally after look or with face: looking Roman, keeping a Roman face.
- 14Belonging to, coming from, or relating to the Byzantine Empire.
Roman envoys from Constantinople arrived at the Bulgarian court bearing silk and gold.
By the eleventh century the Roman army relied heavily on foreign mercenaries.
SimilarByzantine
Note
Historians who write Roman for the medieval eastern empire are following its own usage: its rulers and people never stopped calling their state Roman, and Byzantine is a label scholars gave it long afterward. In such writing, check the century, because the same word also covers the ancient empire.
- 15A person born in or living in the Byzantine Empire.
Venetian merchants with special trading rights were bitterly resented by the Romans of Constantinople.
A Roman living in eleventh-century Constantinople spoke Greek, not Latin.
SimilarByzantine
Note
Historians of the eastern empire use the word for its people, so a Roman of this kind looks east to Constantinople rather than to Italy. In John Wortley's 2010 translation of John Skylitzes, A Synopsis of Byzantine History, 811–1057, Gagik of Vanand surrenders his Armenian kingdom to the Romans in 1064: the empire, not the city. The word is always capitalized.
- 16A member of the Roman Catholic Church.
My aunt, a lifelong Roman, was scandalized when her son was married at city hall.
‘Is it like―I don’t know―Catholicism? One only spots the other Romans when one’s practised it oneself?’
2006, Sarah Waters, The Night WatchSimilarCatholic
Note
Catholic is the everyday word now, and Roman on its own sounds old-fashioned or knowing. Sarah Waters gives it that wry note in The Night Watch, where one character wonders whether, as with Catholicism, you only spot the other Romans once you have practiced it yourself.
- 17A long work of prose fiction; a novel.
The roman ran to three volumes, and the circulating library would lend only one at a time.
Before he turned to poetry, he published a slim roman about life in a river town.
Note
It sounds bookish and borrowed today, and novel is the ordinary word. It survives mainly in critics' prose, where a story that follows one family through the years can be waved off as "the usual family roman", as Michael Bronski did in 1986 while praising a book that rose above it.
- 18A male first name of Latin origin, taken into English in recent times from other European languages.
- 19A family name.
- 20A single letter or other character set in Roman type.
- 21A Romanian city in the county of Neamț, in the northeast of the country.
Showing meanings only.
Practice
Can you tell the meanings of roman apart? Answer 3 quick questions from this page, or write your own sentence and AI will check it.
Origins
From Old French Romain, from Latin Rōmānus; in reference to the Byzantine Empire, via the Byzantine Greek name Ῥωμαῖος (Rhōmaîos). It can also be analyzed as Rome + -an, and is a doublet of Romano.
From Roman ("of ancient Rome"), after the letters and numerals of the ancient Romans.