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amok
[ uh-muhk, uh-mok ]
noun
- (among members of certain Southeast Asian cultures) a psychic disturbance characterized by depression followed by a manic urge to murder.
adjective
amok
/ əˈmʌk; əˈmʌk; əˈmɒk /
noun
- a state of murderous frenzy, originally observed among Malays
adverb
- run amokrun amok to run about with or as if with a frenzied desire to kill
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Word History and Origins
Origin of amok1
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Word History and Origins
Origin of amok1
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Idioms and Phrases
- run / go amok. amuck ( def 3 ).
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Example Sentences
Many of the lawmakers I spoke to were reluctant to propose sweeping legislation that could run amok of civil liberties.
It’s not that they don’t fear AI running amok—it’s that they see it already happening, just not in the ways most people would expect.
Moreover, they do almost nothing to address the very real privacy and security risks of corporate data exploitation run amok.
Greenhouse gases have run amok and made it totally inhospitable—perhaps an extreme version of what Earth could look like in the very distant future.
The story was framed as an instance of lawless youth run amok – an almost unprovoked riot.
Perhaps the real clowns losing face while their evil clones run amok.
His sexual life, just like his barbarism, was the result of deliberation, not appetites run amok.
Do they have a point, or are their complaints just anti-intellectualism run amok?
Tatum wears the shame(s) of a nation on his face in this quietly devastating portrait of the American dream run amok.
“When you have an executive who has run amok, it is the solution our Founding Fathers have laid out,” he said.
Briggs was taking no chances with another of the yellow dogs running amok.
A boy came up to us in great excitement to say that the prisoner had got hold of a bayonet and was running amok.
So he takes his knife an' runs amok to stab so many people as he can, an' he don't care a dam' if only he makes a big smash.
I saw one instance where a henpecked husband "ran amok" and killed or wounded seventeen people before he himself was killed.
All was confusion, all a kind of wild and orgiastic dream, culmination of heredity, of a spirit run amok.
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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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