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surrogate

nounadjectiveverbattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈsʌɹəɡɪt//
  • United Kingdom//ˈsʌɹəɡeɪt//
  • Canada//ˈsɝəɡɪt//
  • Canada//ˈsɝəɡeɪt//

A substitute (usually of a person, position or role).

noun

  1. 1

    A substitute (usually of a person, position or role).

    A mixture of horseradish and mustard often serves as a surrogate for wasabi.

  2. 2

    A person or animal that acts as a substitute for the social or pastoral role of another, such as a surrogate parent.

  3. 3

    A deputy for a bishop in granting licences for marriage.

  4. 4

    A politician or person of influence campaigning for a presidential candidate.

  5. 5

    A judicial officer of limited jurisdiction, who administers matters of probate and intestate succession and, in some cases, adoptions.

  6. 6

    Any of a range of Unicode codepoints which are used in pairs in UTF-16 to represent characters beyond the Basic Multilingual Plane.

  7. 7

    An ersatz good.

  8. 8

    Variant of surrogate keyEllipsis of surrogate key.

Etymology

From Latin surrogātus, perfect passive participle of surrogō (“ask”); a variant of subrogō, from sub (“under”) + rogō (“ask”).

adjective

  1. 1

    Of, concerning, relating to or acting as a substitute.

verb

  1. 1

    To replace or substitute something with something else; to appoint a successor.

Forms

plural
surrogates
comparative
more surrogate
superlative
most surrogate
past tense
surrogated
past participle
surrogated
present participle
surrogating
third person singular
surrogates
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).