Other forms: sprints, sprinting, sprinted
A sprint is a short run at absolute top speed — everything you have, for as long as you can hold it. The last twenty metres to a closing train, a hundred-metre final over in ten seconds, the dash for the line at the end of a cycling stage.
It is a verb as well, and the verb is the one you will meet more: you sprint for the bus, sprint up the stairs, sprint the last stretch. Someone who races short distances is a sprinter and the training is sprinting. The whole point of the word is that it cannot last, so anything called a sprint is short and flat out. Offices borrowed it for exactly that reason: a sprint is a fixed block of work, two weeks say, that a team plans, does and closes before starting the next. And the contrast comes up everywhere — it's a marathon, not a sprint.
1verbrunTo run at your fastest for a short distance.
“He sprinted for the doors as they started to close.”
2nounsprintA short race, or a short burst of running, at top speed.
“The final sprint decided the whole stage.”
synonyms: dash
3nounfixedA short fixed period of concentrated work that a team plans and finishes together.
“The redesign is scheduled for the next sprint.”
Also accepted in games: dash
Sprint is a reshaping of an older English verb, sprent, meaning to leap, bound or dart, which came in from Old Norse sprenta and Proto-Germanic sprantijaną. Behind that is a root about flinching and jumping — the sudden movement a body makes before the mind has agreed to it. The word was about the burst long before it was about the race.
Proto-Germanic
*sprantijaną
Old Norse
*sprenta
enm-nor
sprenten
English, today
sprint
Built from
From sprent. Alteration of earlier sprent (“to leap; bound; dart”), from enm-nor sprenten, from Old Norse sprenta (for later spretta), from Proto-Germanic sprantijaną, causative of Proto-Germanic sprintaną (“to jump up; bounce”), from Proto-Indo-European sprend-, sprendʰ- (“to flinch; jump”), from Proto-Indo-European sper- (“to twitch; fidget; flinch; jump; be quick”). Cognate with Middle High German sprenzen (“to sprinkle; splash”), Swedish spritta (“to startle”), Icelandic spretta (“to spring forth; emerge; arise; develop”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Sports & Fitness, Sports & Games Played, Cycling