rerun
Americanverb (used with object)
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reruns,
present (3rd person singular)
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reran,
past
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rerun,
past participle
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rerunning
present participle
noun
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reruns
plural
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the act of rerunning.
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a showing of a motion picture or television program after its initial run, usually some months or years later.
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the motion picture or television program being shown again.
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Informal. a person or thing that is merely a restatement or imitation of something familiar; rehash.
The plot is just a rerun of every other spy story.
verb
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to broadcast or put on (a film, play, series, etc) again
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to run (a race, etc) again
noun
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a film, play, series, etc, that is broadcast or put on again; repeat
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a race that is run again
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computing the repeat of a part of a computer program
Other Word Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
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rerunsimple
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rerunssimple
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have rerunperfect
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has rerunperfect
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am rerunningprogressive
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are rerunningprogressive
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is rerunningprogressive
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have been rerunningperfect progressive
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has been rerunningperfect progressive
Past
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reransimple
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had rerunperfect
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was rerunningprogressive
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were rerunningprogressive
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had been rerunningperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of rerun
Explanation
When a TV or radio station plays a show again, after its first broadcast, that's a rerun. You may have grown up watching reruns of the shows your parents loved when they were kids. Use rerun as a noun, for the show itself, or a verb, to describe the process of rebroadcasting it: "They rerun this movie every year at Christmas time." When someone used this word in the early nineteenth century, they were talking about races being rerun, or run again. It was first used to mean "television rebroadcast" around 1955.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
They were watching a rerun of “The Porter Wagoner Show,” the program that had helped launch Dolly to country music stardom, on a little TV set using rabbit ears, when she appeared.
From Salon ● Aug. 26, 2026
And Thursday night’s performance, while not wholly irrelevant, was just another television rerun broadcast to a less-than-mass audience.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 15, 2026
The news conference itself felt at times like a rerun of the previous launch news conference when the fight was first revealed.
From BBC ● Apr. 9, 2026
Double-digit earnings growth and significant hedging by traders could mean a rerun of the rebound seen after last year’s Tariff Tantrum.
From Barron's ● Mar. 20, 2026
“Oh. Well, repast, repath, rerun, whatever they called, the food is slammin’,” he growled with his mouth hill of everything.
From "The Boy in the Black Suit" by Jason Reynolds
Additionally, studios need to pay residuals to digital replicas used in reruns, and replicas cannot be used during a strike.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 29, 2026
He offers never-ending reruns of the same speech, and at this point it fails to entertain, enlighten or move anyone.
From Salon ● Jul. 31, 2026
Flagship shows such as the 7.30 evening current affairs programme and its breakfast shows on Thursday will not go ahead, with reruns, pre-programmed shows and BBC content to plug the gap.
From BBC ● Mar. 24, 2026
Those avocado green appliances, Formica countertops, and linoleum floors were just as crappy as they appear in those sitcom reruns.
From Barron's ● Mar. 14, 2026
The Next Day After a night of channel surfing and back-to-back reruns of Star Trek, the morning sun rushes in courtesy of the nurse raising the blinds.
From "Booked" by Kwame Alexander
Even so, “when he and Russell reran their data set of opinion articles through the current version, the underlying assessments were similar to those in the earlier iteration.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 3, 2026
In December 2023, when the researchers reran some of the audio files, they found that the updated Whisper had eliminated most of the fabrications found in their previous tests.
From Science Magazine ● Apr. 26, 2024
If you reran the referendum, despite the opinion polls you'd get a very similar result.
From BBC ● Jun. 22, 2023
PBS, which had just started broadcasting in 1970, aired them every day, then reran them every night.
From Slate ● Jun. 10, 2022
Times article about the Freedom Writers reran in a New York paper.
From "The Freedom Writers Diary" by The Freedom Writers
It is hard to imagine a state ordering a rerunning of primaries under new districts to gut old Section 2 districts.
From Slate ● Apr. 29, 2026
Once a show reached the 100-episode mark, it could be sold into syndication, filling up daytime programming schedules for local television stations, rerunning on cable networks or outside of the United States.
From Reuters ● May 22, 2023
And Marple was certainly an inspiration for Angela Lansbury’s Jessica Fletcher in the long-running “Murder, She Wrote,” which may currently be found rerunning on HMM and via Amazon Freevee/Prime Video.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 3, 2022
“There would be a major boycott of TV Land or any network that wanted to start rerunning ‘Cosby,’” he said.
From New York Times ● Jul. 1, 2021
I kept rerunning the dream all day until the coach’s whistle blew and he called “Race-off!” and there I was, heading across the field to the starting line.
From "Crash" by Jerry Spinelli
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.
