Word.ws English Dictionary

run and gun

run and gun verb: to move the ball quickly and shoot often.

Verb

run and gun (third-person singular simple present runs and guns, present participle running and gunning, simple past ran and gunned, past participle run and gunned)

  1. (attributive, often) To move the ball quickly and shoot often.
    • This team likes to run and gun.
    • They're really running and gunning now.
  2. (idiomatic) To do something hastily and with great energy.
    • It has this sort of impulsiveness to it: “One and done.” We do full, A-story episodes in one chunk. For episode six we had Lauren Lapkus, Horatio Sanz, Mitch Hurwitz, me, Mike and Meghan O’Neill in the studio for four hours…we can’t get those people back! So we have to run and gun it.2016 March 4, Drew Grant, “‘Animals.’ Creators Mike Luciano and Phil Matarese on Making a D.I.Y. Cartoon for HBO”, in Observer
    • “We used to just run and gun it,” he says. “Now that we’ve gotten bigger and things got more expensive and we need to kind of up the ante, there’s a lot more production time that goes into it.”2019 October 28, Hannah Sampson, “Inside the creation of travel-worthy haunted houses”, in The Washington Post

Forms of run and gun

third-person singular presentruns and guns
present participlerunning and gunning
pastran and gunned
past participlerun and gunned

Questions about run and gun

What does run and gun mean?
Run and gun means to move the ball quickly and shoot often.
What part of speech is run and gun?
Run and gun is a verb.
What is the past tense of run and gun?
The past tense of run and gun is ran and gunned.

Words near run and gun in the dictionary

  1. run ahead
  2. run along
  3. run amok
  4. run amuck
  5. run an errand
  6. run and gun
  7. run and gunned
  8. run and repeat
  9. run and repeated
  10. run around
  11. run around after

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: run and gun (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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-run and gun.wav.

Cite this entry: “run and gun.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/run_and_gun. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.