Word.ws English Dictionary

out of the running

out of the running prepositional phrase: no longer in a competition; eliminated from consideration.

Prepositional phrase

  1. (idiomatic) No longer in a competition; eliminated from consideration.
    • When it was revealed he had shielded a friend from prosecution when he was the district attorney, he was out of the running for a judicial appointment.
    • 8 Jan 2020, Felicity Cloake in The Guardian, How to make the perfect gluten-free chocolate brownies – recipe
      What that flour is hardly seems to matter too much, either – indeed, one of the finest examples I’ve ever eaten was shared, rather grudgingly, it must be admitted, with a coeliac friend....

Questions about out of the running

What does out of the running mean?
Out of the running means no longer in a competition; eliminated from consideration.
What part of speech is out of the running?
Out of the running is a prepositional phrase.

Words near out of the running in the dictionary

  1. out of the mouths of babes
  2. out of the mouths of babes and sucklings
  3. out of the ordinary
  4. out of the picture
  5. out of the question
  6. out of the running
  7. out of the side of one's mouth
  8. out of the starting gate
  9. out of the way
  10. out of the window
  11. out of the woods

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: out of the running (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.

Last updated:

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

Cite this entry: “out of the running.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/out_of_the_running. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.