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chaperone

nounverbattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈʃæ.pəˌɹəʊn//
  • United States//ˈʃæ.pəˌɹoʊn//

An older person who accompanies other younger people to ensure the propriety of their behaviour, often an older woman accompanying a young woman.

noun

  1. 1

    An older person who accompanies other younger people to ensure the propriety of their behaviour, often an older woman accompanying a young woman.

  2. 2

    A protein that assists the non-covalent folding/unfolding and the assembly/disassembly of other macromolecular structures, but does not occur in these structures when the latter are performing their normal biological functions.

  3. 3

    An employee sent by a British company to the European Union to work with a client there, to circumvent restrictions imposed after Brexit.

Etymology

See chaperon.

verb

  1. 1

    To act as a chaperone.

    They played you off very cunning, Eliza. If it had been only one of them, you could have nailed him. But you see, there was two; and one of them chaperoned the other, as you might say.

    'Purcell had volunteered to chaperone a delegation of female students'

    TfL has more than enough to be getting on with each day without having to chaperone TV crews.

  2. 2

    To work as a chaperone.

Forms

plural
chaperones
past tense
chaperoned
past participle
chaperoned
present participle
chaperoning
third person singular
chaperones
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).