Other forms: runs, ran, running
Run is what you do when walking will not get you there in time — both feet off the ground between steps, arms going. You run for the bus, run up the stairs, run down the beach into the sea.
The word has a whole second life with no legs in it. You run a shop, a school, a country; the engine runs, the tap runs, the program runs overnight; buses run every ten minutes and the colours run in the wash. As a noun it is a morning run, a run of bad luck, a run on the bank. Watch the past tense, because it is irregular: you ran yesterday and you have run before. And it takes a preposition almost everywhere it goes — run out of milk, run into an old friend, run through the plan one more time.
1verbrunTo move on foot faster than walking, with both feet off the ground between steps.~7%
“I run to the station most mornings.”
2verbmanageTo be in charge of a business, an organisation, or an event.~59%
“She runs a bakery on the corner.”
3verboperateOf a machine, a service or a piece of software: to be working and keeping going.~27%
“The buses run every ten minutes until midnight.”
4nounspellA spell of running, done for exercise.~7%
“He goes for a run before work every day.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 140 sentences found in the wild and placed 44 of them on a sense (96 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Run's cousins across the North Sea do not run at all — they flow. German rinnen, Swedish rinna and Icelandic renna all mean to flow, and the root under the whole set, *h₃reyH-, meant to boil or churn. English kept both halves of that: you run for the bus, and the water runs down the glass.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₃er-
Proto-Indo-European
*h₃reyH- — to boil, churn
Proto-Germanic
*rinnaną — to run
Old Norse
rinna — to run
Old English
rinnan
Middle English
runnen
English, today
run
Built from
From Middle English runnen, rennen (“to run”), alteration (due to the past participle runne, runnen, yronne) of Middle English rinnen (“to run”), from Old English rinnan, iernan (“to run”) and Old Norse rinna (“to run”), both from Proto-Germanic rinnaną (“to run”), from Proto-Indo-European h₃reyH- (“to boil, churn”). Cognate with Scots rin (“to run”), West Frisian rinne (“to walk, march”), archaic Dutch rinnen (“to flow”, still in geronnen), German rinnen (“to flow”), Swedish rinna (“to flow”), and Icelandic renna (“to flow”). From the causative rannijaną (“to make run”) are Dutch rennen, German rennen, Danish rende, Swedish ränna (all “to run”). Non-Germanic cognates include Albanian rend (“to run, run after”), Persian راندن (“to move, set in motion”). See also random.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA