run amok

Idioms and Phrases

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.

Example Sentences

Perhaps the real clowns losing face while their evil clones run amok.

From The Daily Beast

His sexual life, just like his barbarism, was the result of deliberation, not appetites run amok.

From The Daily Beast

Do they have a point, or are their complaints just anti-intellectualism run amok?

From The Daily Beast

Tatum wears the shame(s) of a nation on his face in this quietly devastating portrait of the American dream run amok.

From The Daily Beast

“When you have an executive who has run amok, it is the solution our Founding Fathers have laid out,” he said.

From The Daily Beast

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

From Project Gutenberg

That three hundred pounds was composed of too much muscle and too little fat for Sam Bending to allow it to run amok.

From Project Gutenberg

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.

From Project Gutenberg

Soames had done for him—done for him by that act of property that had sent the Buccaneer to run amok that fatal afternoon.

From Project Gutenberg

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.

From Project Gutenberg

Related Words

• defy
• overthrow
• renounce
• resist
• revolt
• secede
• take up arms