referral
/ɹɪˈfɝ.əl/noun
referral is spelled R-E-F-E-R-R-A-L. The wrong spelling people search most is referal: about 2,560 Bing searches a month in the United States (September 2025 to August 2026), about 1 in 10 of all searches for the word. Referral is a noun meaning “The act or process of transferring someone or something to another, of sending by reference, or referring”. The plural of referral is referrals.
How do you spell referral?
Referral is spelled R-E-F-E-R-R-A-L. One wrong spelling is searched or written often enough to measure; together they are about 1 in 10 of the searches for referral in either form.
Bing searches in the United States: the average month from September 2025 to August 2026 (Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, read September 30, 2026). Wrong spellings are taken from Wiktionary entries tagged "misspelling" and its obsolete or nonstandard forms, Wikipedia's Lists of common misspellings and the codespell dictionary, then measured. The proofreader's marks show the change that corrects each one.
What does referral mean?
noun
- 1
The act or process of transferring someone or something to another, of sending by reference, or referring.
The insurance company insists I get a referral from my regular doctor. I can't just go to the specialist; a GP has got to refer me.
- 2
slangA document used by schools detailing some form of a student's misbehavior and listing the actions taken before and after the student's receipt of the referral.
After misbehaving in class, George was given a referral for disrupting class and sent to the office.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce referral?
- UK /ɹɪˈfɜː.ɹəl/
- US /ɹɪˈfɝ.əl/
- Australia /ɹɪˈfɜː.ɹəl/
Referral has 3 syllables (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-au-referral.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of referral
- referrals plural
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is referral?
Referral appears 4.0 times per million words in written English, the 12,940th most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Referral in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
In the sense act or process of transferring:
| Language | Words |
|---|---|
| German | Überweisung |
| Portuguese | encaminhamento |
| Spanish | remisión, derivación, referimiento |
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.
Where does referral come from?
From refer + -al.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).