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OneKitly

policeman

nouncommon in dialogue

  • //pəˈliːsmən//

A police officer, usually a male.

noun

  1. 1

    A police officer, usually a male.

    The policeman who arrests the "Red" does not understand the theories the "Red" is preaching; if he did, his own position as bodyguard of the monied class might seem less pleasant to him.

    Meanwhile Nanny Broome was recovering from her initial panic and seemed anxious to make up for any kudos she might have lost, by exerting her personality to the utmost. She took the policeman's helmet and placed it on a chair, and unfolded his tunic to shake it and fold it up again for him.

    Still agitated, she watched resentfully as two traffic policemen remounted their motorcycles.

  2. 2

    A glass rod capped at one end with rubber, used in a chemistry laboratory for gravimetric analysis.

  3. 3

    Any skipper of the genus Coeliades.

  4. 4

    Synonym of enforcer.

    A team may have a policeman or enforcer.

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *tpelH- Proto-Hellenic *ptólis Ancient Greek πόλις (pólis) Proto-Indo-European *-tósder. Ancient Greek -της (-tēs) Ancient Greek πολῑ́της (polī́tēs) Proto-Indo-European *-h₂ Proto-Indo-European *-éh₂ Proto-Indo-European *-i-eh₂ Proto-Hellenic *-íā Ancient Greek -ῐ́ᾱ (-ĭ́ā) Ancient Greek πολῑτείᾱ (polīteíā)bor. Latin politiabor. Middle French policeder. English police Proto-Indo-European *mon- Proto-Germanic *mann- Proto-West Germanic *mann Old English mann Middle English man Middle English -man English -man English policeman From police + -man.

Forms

plural
policemen
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).