rival

Forms

1.Someone or something with similar claims of quality or distinction as another.
- As a social historian, he has no rival.
2.A competitor (person, team, company, etc.) with the same goal as another, or striving to attain the same thing. Defeating a rival may be a primary or necessary goal of a competitor.
- Chris is my biggest rival in the 400-metre race.

1.Having the same pretensions or claims; standing in competition for superiority.
- The strenuous conflicts and alternate victories of two rival confederacies of statesmen.

1.To oppose or compete with.
2.To be equal to, or match, or to surpass another.
- The original family who had begun to build a palace to rival Nonesuch had died out before they had put up little more than the gateway, […].
- But the Waverley is still the best-placed station of any British city, and gives the arriving stranger a first impression rivalled in Europe only by the exclusively watery station approach at Venice.
3.To strive to equal or excel; to emulate.

Rare· #4727

Learned borrowing from Latin rīvālis (literally “person using the same stream as another”).

By surface analysis, Latin rīvus + -al.