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defender

nounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//dɪˈfɛndə(ɹ)//

Someone who defends people or property.

noun

  1. 1

    Someone who defends people or property.

  2. 2

    One of the players whose primary task is to prevent the opposition from scoring.

  3. 3

    A fighter who seeks to repel an attack.

  4. 4

    rareA lawyer who represents defendants, especially a public defender; a defense attorney (US) or defence counsel (UK).

    There was another protection to which she was intitled by that law, namely, a defender; but she had none.

    So, what is contemplated under this model is that the defender would work with civil legal services lawyers to address the clients' needs.

    It puts you at the head of the table, at a right angle to the witness; the court reporter sits to your right, and the defender sits on the witness's far side.

  5. 5

    A defendant in a civil action.

Etymology

From Middle English defender, deffender, defendere, defendour, defendoure, partly from Anglo-Norman defendour, from Old French defendëor; partly from Middle English defenden + -ere, equivalent to defend + -er.

Forms

plural
defenders
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).