run amok


Also, run riot or wild. Behave in a frenzied, out-of-control, or unrestrained manner. For example, I was afraid that if I left the toddler alone she would run amok and have a hard time calming down, or The weeds are running riot in the lawn, or The children were running wild in the playground. Amok comes from a Malay word for “frenzied” and was adopted into English, and at first spelled amuck, in the second half of the 1600s. Run riot dates from the early 1500s and derives from an earlier sense, that is, a hound's following an animal scent. Run wild alludes to an animal reverting to its natural, uncultivated state; its figurative use dates from the late 1700s.

Words Nearby run amok

The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary Copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

How to use run amok in a sentence

  • All was confusion, all a kind of wild and orgiastic dream, culmination of heredity, of a spirit run amok.

    Cursed | George Allan England
  • That three hundred pounds was composed of too much muscle and too little fat for Sam Bending to allow it to run amok.

    Damned If You Don't | Gordon Randall Garrett
  • If you run amok in Malaya, you may kill your enemy or your dearest friend, but you will be krissed in the end like a pariah dog.

    Tales of the Malayan Coast | Rounsevelle Wildman
  • Soames had done for him—done for him by that act of property that had sent the Buccaneer to run amok that fatal afternoon.

    The Forsyte Saga, Complete | John Galsworthy
  • And that's just what he was; for he was a major, who could run amok like any second lieutenant, and he was forty, if a day.

    Tell England | Ernest Raymond