Runs

How to spell runs

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce runs

What does runs mean?

1. verbMoves swiftly on foot, or operates and manages something.
2. nounUnits of scoring in cricket or baseball.

Runs in a sentence

• verb

  She runs five miles along the canal every morning before work.

• noun

  The batsman scored ninety runs before lunch on the first day.

• verb

  The new manager runs the entire distribution warehouse single-handedly.

• noun

  His team needed three more runs to win the baseball game.

Where does runs come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the inflected form of the verb and noun 'run', which traces back to Old English, where two closely related verbs, 'rinnan' and 'iernan', both meant 'to flow' or 'to move swiftly'. These were Germanic words, with cousins in Old Norse 'rinna' and modern German 'rennen', all carrying the basic idea of rapid movement or flowing liquid. Over the medieval period the verb's irregular forms levelled out into the simpler pattern we use today, giving us 'run', 'ran', and 'running'. The ending '-s' here does double duty: it marks the third-person singular present tense ('she runs') and the plural of the noun ('three runs'). Because the word is short and phonetically regular, the spelling has stayed remarkably stable for over a thousand years.

How the word is built

• run (Old English root meaning to move swiftly)
• -s (third-person singular verb ending, or noun plural ending)