Runners

How to spell runners

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce runners

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does runners mean?

1. nounPeople who run, especially as athletes or competitors in a race.
2. nounThe strips or rails on which something slides, such as on a drawer or a sledge.
3. nounLong narrow strips of fabric used to decorate tables or to protect floors.
4. nounCreeping horizontal stems that some plants send out to form new growth.

Runners in a sentence

• The marathon attracted thousands of runners from around the world.

• The drawer stuck because the metal runners had bent slightly.

• She laid embroidered runners along the centre of each banquet table.

• The strawberry plants sent out runners that rooted in the next bed.

• The fastest runners qualified for the national team.

• He waxed the runners on the sledge before the children went out in the snow.

Where does runners come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the plural of 'runner', which combines the verb 'run' with the agent suffix '-er' that turns a verb into a doer of the action. The verb 'run' descends from Old English 'rinnan' and 'iernan', meaning 'to flow' or 'to move swiftly', words shared across the Germanic family and related to forms in Old Norse and Old High German. The agentive sense, a person who runs, was established by the late medieval period, and the word steadily picked up many extended meanings for things that slide, glide, or trail. From the 1600s onward it named the sliding strips on a sledge, then the long narrow strip of cloth on a table, and the creeping stems that strawberry plants send out. Because the base is the plain native verb 'run', the spelling trap lies only in the doubled 'n' before '-er', a doubling required because a short stressed vowel needs the consonant repeated.

How the word is built

• run (to move quickly on foot)
• -er (agent noun suffix)
• -s (plural)