runoff

nounB2+Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #12,925 of 15,258mostly written

Other forms: runoffs

Runoff is water that flows off the land instead of soaking in. Agricultural runoff, surface runoff, runoff into the river.

It carries whatever is on the ground with it, which is how fertiliser and slurry reach rivers and cause the algal blooms that kill fish. Paving increases it enormously, which is why cities flood.

Definitions of runoff

1nounrunoffWater that flows off the land instead of soaking in.B2+
“After heavy rain, runoff from the fields turned the stream brown with mud.”

runoff is a flow.

Where it comes from

Deverbal from run off.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

runoff in the wild

Like instant-runoff (ranked-choice) voting and first past the post, it elects one winner.
Two-round system
Georgia, Louisiana, California, and Washington use the two-round system for most or all non-presidential elections, while Alaska and Maine use a similar instant-runoff system.
Two-round system
Most runoff is conveyed directly as surface water to nearby streams, rivers or other large water bodies (wetlands, lakes and oceans) without treatment.
Stormwater
Farmers can install erosion controls to reduce runoff flows and retain soil on their fields.
Agricultural wastewater treatment
The Borda count electoral system can be combined with an instant-runoff procedure to create hybrid election methods that are called Nanson's method and Baldwin's method.
Nanson's method

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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