Word.ws English Dictionary

like the wind

like the wind prepositional phrase: quickly, at a high speed.

Prepositional phrase

  1. (simile) Quickly, at a high speed.
    • At any rate, in my experience, they could run like the wind, but longer and heavier trains slowly but surely became too much for them.1947 July and August, “Notes and News: Caledonian Reminiscences”, in Railway Magazine, page 256
    • Although we took our eight bogies along to Whitstable at 60 m.p.h., and made a clean start from there, after Herne Bay the engine primed badly on Blacksole Bank and nearly stopped before we got over the top. Then we ran like the wind across the marshes with half-regulator, 30 per cent cut-off, and...1959 April, P. Ransome-Wallis, “The Southern in Trouble on the Kent Coast”, in Trains Illustrated, London: Ian Allan Publishing, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 220
  2. (simile) Changeably, freely and at liberty.
  3. (simile) Invisibly, mysteriously, unpredictably.
    • The Spirit Of God is like the wind. Note well that his operation is unexpected. The wind bloweth where it listeth, so that thou knowest not what wind to expect.1889, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit

Examples of like the wind in a sentence

  • Then we ran like the wind across the marshes with half-regulator, 30 per cent cut-off, and the engine blowing off.1959 April, P. Ransome-Wallis, “The Southern in Trouble on the Kent Coast”, in Trains Illustrated, London: Ian Allan Publishing, →ISSN...
  • How she would fly like the wind, up that road in front of the house, and away.2006, Bridgette Z. Savage, Fly Like the Wind, →ISBN:
  • Even if I don't run like the wind I have my own bag of tricks.2011, V.C. Andrews, Petals on the Wind, →ISBN:

Questions about like the wind

What does like the wind mean?
Like the wind means quickly, at a high speed.
How do you use like the wind in a sentence?
Then we ran like the wind across the marshes with half-regulator, 30 per cent cut-off, and the engine blowing off.
What part of speech is like the wind?
Like the wind is a prepositional phrase.

Words near like the wind in the dictionary

  1. like the devil
  2. like the man said
  3. like the man says
  4. like the new time
  5. like the sound of one's own voice
  6. like the wind
  7. like the wrath of God
  8. like there is no tomorrow
  9. like there was no tomorrow
  10. like there were no tomorrow
  11. like there's no tomorrow

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: like the wind (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-like the wind.ogg.

Cite this entry: “like the wind.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/like_the_wind. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.