Meaning of behalf in English

behalf

noun

/bɪˈhɑːf/ us

/bɪˈhæf/

on behalf of someone (US also in behalf of sb); (on someone's behalf); (US also in someone's behalf)

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representing:

On behalf of the entire company, I would like to thank you for all your work.

Unfortunately, George cannot be with us today so I am pleased to accept this award on his behalf.

She wasn't able to be present, so I signed the letter in her behalf.

for the good of or because of:

Please don't leave on my behalf.

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The executive of the health workers' union accepted the proposed pay increase on behalf of their members.
He gave what amounted to an apology on behalf of his company.
What a liberty, to refuse the invitation on your behalf, without even asking you!
He's spending a lot of his time at the moment campaigning on behalf of the Conservative Party.
The company was set up to buy and sell shares on behalf of investors.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Replacing and exchanging

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Linguistics: connecting words which introduce a cause or reason

(Definition of behalf from the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus © Cambridge University Press)

Examples of behalf

behalf

Now the beer corporations were mobilising bands on behalf of their own version of the national project.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Conservatives in power, he argues, carried the ' pursuit of order ' to such an extreme as to provoke a violent reaction on behalf of liberty.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Broadcasters rationalise their response to such pressures as acting not on behalf of those who lobby them, but in the interests of their audiences.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Fathers continued to emancipate their children and negotiate marriage contracts on their behalf ; there are even occasional examples of widows seeking paternal authorization to remarry.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

The size of the selectorate influences how hard leaders work on behalf of their supporters.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

The county committees were thus left with the onerous task of managing many sequestered estates on the behalf of the state.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Second, civil affairs departments could ask for material investment or privileged policies at local levels on behalf of 'community services'.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Tasks: all agent based systems perform tasks on behalf of their ' 'owners' '.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

He had made it clear that he did not expect to be further importuned on behalf of any party who would not accept their introduction.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Instead, the government would act as an active and prudent purchaser, on behalf of the population, to select and contract with providers.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

An example guideline is that each user should be paired with a software agent that will be able to act on the user's behalf.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

There is no discussion of precisely which risks are being managed, and on whose behalf.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

The arguments offered on behalf of this thesis are of three kinds : textual, scientific, and philosophical.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

They allow us to act on behalf of the highest good knowing perfectly well that it may not be achievable in this life.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

The state acted as the moving force of economic and social development on behalf of the populace.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

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These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.

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