Word.ws English Dictionary

runt

/ɹʌnt/

More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations

Northern England/ɹʊnt/

runt noun: the smallest animal of a litter.

Noun

runt (plural runts)

  1. The smallest animal of a litter.
    • Sometimes, as we have seen, one member of a litter is a runt, much smaller than the rest. He is unable to fight for food as strongly as the rest, and runts often die. We have considered the conditions under which it would actually pay a mother to let a runt die.1976, Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Kindle edition, OUP Oxford, published 2016, page 168
  2. (broadly) The smallest child in the family.
    • the runt of the family
  3. Undersized or stunted plant, animal or person.
    Synonyms:
    dwarf
  4. (slang) An uninfluential or unimportant person; a nobody.
  5. An Ethernet packet that does not meet the medium's minimum packet size of 64 bytes.
  6. A single word (or portion of a hyphenated word) that appears as the last line of a paragraph.
  7. A breed of pigeon related to the carrier pigeon.
  8. (UK, dialectal, obsolete) A hardened stem or stalk of a plant.
    • Neither young poles nor old runts are durable1601, C[aius] Plinius Secundus [i.e., Pliny the Elder], “[Book XVI.]”, in Philemon Holland, transl., The Historie of the World. Commonly Called, The Naturall Historie of C. Plinius Secundus. […], 1st...
  9. A bow.

Synonyms of runt

Forms of runt

pluralrunts

Origin of runt

The OED classifies this word as "of obscure origin". Some see a connection to Middle Dutch runt (“ox”), but the OED considers this to be unlikely. Possibly connected to Icelandic hrotti meaning "brute".

Words formed from runt

Words that rhyme with runt

11 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about runt

What does runt mean?
Runt means the smallest animal of a litter.
What part of speech is runt?
Runt is a noun.
How do you pronounce runt?
Runt is pronounced /ɹʌnt/ (UK).
What is the plural of runt?
The plural of runt is runts.

Words near runt in the dictionary

  1. runscoring
  2. runspace
  3. runspaces
  4. runstand
  5. runstands
  6. runt
  7. runt disease
  8. runt of the litter
  9. Runte
  10. runted
  11. runtedness

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: runt (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)-Vealhurl-runt.wav.

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