Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use runaway in a sentence

40 example sentences · noun, adjective

Runaway means a person or animal that runs away or has run away; a person, animal, or organization that escapes captivity or restrictions. Example: “Runaways are vulnerable to criminal exploitation.”

Examples of runaway by meaning

nounA person or animal that runs away or has run away; a person, animal, or organization that escapes captivity or...

  • Runaways are vulnerable to criminal exploitation.

nounA vehicle (especially, a train) that is out of control.

  • Just south of Wamphray Station, they overtook the runaway.1950 January, David L. Smith, “A Runaway at Beattock”, in Railway Magazine, page 54
  • The former Midland main lines out of Bristol were blocked for more than 18hr after a freight train runaway soon after midnight on February 7.1962 April, “Motive power miscellany: Western Region”, in Modern Railways, page 280

nounAn object or process that is out of control or out of equilibrium.

  • A trim runaway can make an airplane almost impossible to fly.
  • On the chart, the start of a runaway is marked by a box1989, Gerald Appel, Winning market systems
  • An IS executive's worst nightmare, such runaways are a fact of life.1993 June 15, CIO, volume 6, number 14, page 26

nounThe act of running away, especially of a horse or teams.

  • They could also be useful in preventing or stopping runaways.2012, John H. White, Jr., Wet Britches and Muddy Boots, page 171

nounAn overwhelming victory.

  • The home side won in a runaway.

adjectiveHaving run away; escaped; fugitive; fleeting.

  • a runaway thief

adjectiveHaving escaped from the control of the rider or driver.

  • a runaway donkey

adjectivePertaining to or accomplished by running away or eloping.

  • a runaway marriage

More sentences with runaway

  • The runaway computer program was messaging non-stop.From the entry message
  • He managed to catch the runaway bull with a lasso.From the entry lasso
  • After the new party took power, the government declared a revaluation of the currency in an attempt to limit runaway inflation.From the entry revaluation
  • To help prevent a runaway caused by brake fade, heavy trucks are required to stop at the top of the downgrade to give their brakes time to cool.From the entry brake fade
  • Dreams are for fools and idiots, and zeal without knowledge is a runaway horse."2014, August Franza, AMERICA ARRIBA!: Don Quijote and Sancho Panza in the 21st Century, →ISBN. From the entry zeal without knowledge is a runaway horse
  • Vincent were “underhanded” and the phenomenon of runaways, or marronage, only exacerbated the problem.2012, Christopher Taylor, The Black Carib Wars: Freedom, Survival, and the Making of the Garifuna, page 1617033111. From the entry underhanded
  • The goatwalker is a runaway slave who knows how to live off the land.1988, David Quammen, The Flight of the Iguana. From the entry goatwalking
  • To the police, she fit the bill for a runaway.2026 July 16, Nicholas Muhoro, “Inside the 2004 Brianna Maitland Case: One of Vermont’s Most Haunting Mysteries”, in Skip Boring, archived…. From the entry fit the bill
  • Many freights were not fully braked, and catch points were provided on steep gradients to derail runaway wagons.2020 April 8, David Clough, “How the West Coast wiring war was won”, in Rail, page 63. From the entry catch points
  • They do not understand that “zeal without knowledge is a runaway horse” and that's why they are unproductive.2016, Johnstone Kayandabila, Leadership's Big Idea: High-Potential Leaders in the Making, →ISBN. From the entry zeal without knowledge is a runaway horse
  • Runaway horses trample the ground on the range.2013, Rollin Woodruff, The King's Cupbearer, page 71. From the entry frenzily
  • Despite the decline of Indian slavery, throughout the eighteenth century South Carolina newspapers frequently advertised for runaway Indian and Afro-Indian slaves.2003, Jayme A. Sokolow, The Great Encounter: Native Peoples and European Settlers in the Americas, 1492-1800, M.E. Sharpe, →ISBN, page 177. From the entry Afro-Indian
  • Runaway Train is at times a ripsnortingly tense action movie.1985, Joseph Becker Phillips, Malcolm Muir, Raymond Moley, Rex Smith, Samuel Thurston Williamson (editors), Newsweek, volume 106, numbers…. From the entry ripsnortingly
  • The fact is that Reaganomics slowed down the breakneck economy and succeeded in defeating public enemy number one, runaway inflation.1983 January 17, William Safire, “Essay: The Midterm Crisis”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN…. From the entry public enemy number one
  • Had he been instructed to do this earlier by the dispatcher, he might have succeeded in staying ahead of the runaway.1981 August 18, National Transportation Safety Board, “Role of Dispatcher”, in Railroad Accident Report: Rear-End Collision of Union…. From the entry outrun
  • These epics nearly always had runaway trains, nincompoops floundering with the controls and a collapsed bridge just ahead!1958 February, David Gunston, “Railways on the Screen”, in Railway Magazine, page 88. From the entry flounder
  • Just south of Wamphray station they overtook the runaway.1950 January, David L. Smith, “A Runaway at Beattock”, in Railway Magazine, page 54. From the entry huddle
  • Drivers traveling along westbound Interstate 70 on Tuesday saw a perilous scene when a semitruck was destroyed by flames on a runaway ramp.2024 January 5, Shaul Turner, “‘Nothing left’ of runaway semitruck after fire on I-70”, in KDVR, archived from the original on 27 Aug 2024. From the entry semitruck
  • I don’t want to suggest that any attempt to onshore production will doom America to runaway costs, supply-chain catastrophes, and frayed global alliances.2023 February 8, Derek Thompson, “Don’t ‘Buy American’”, in The Atlantic. From the entry onshore
  • FinOps demands you acknowledge that the old ways of managing infrastructure aren't just ineffective; they create situations where runaway cloud costs can threaten the business.2023, J.R. Storment, Mike Fuller, Cloud FinOps, O'Reilly, →ISBN. From the entry FinOps
  • After all, even if astronomers detect a runaway ploonet orbiting its host star, it would be hard to distinguish it from normal planets.2021 April, Randall Hyman, “The galaxy's marvelous rogues and misfits”, in Astronomy, page 22. From the entry ploonet
  • Runaway lending continues, bad debts mount even higher, and the need for more cash to paper over losses becomes that much more acute.2014, Patric Chovanec, at Bloomberg, China's Runaway Train is Running Out of Track. From the entry paper over
  • Examples of the types of information disseminated at roll call include known warrants, “be on the lookouts” or BOLOs, runaways, and administrative requests and communications.2014, Kären M. Hess, Christine Hess Orthmann, Henry Lim Cho, Introduction to Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, page 131. From the entry be on the lookout
  • Runaway slaves and free blacks were constantly being kidnapped by New York City’s many “Blackbirders,” slave-catching bounty hunters who deported their captures to the plantations.2011, Colin Woodard, chapter 22, in American nations, New York: Penguin, →ISBN. From the entry blackbirder
  • I hear the store speaker call for a cleanup crew: "Code brown on Aisle 2 with a possible runaway cart track to 16."2005 September 9, Bruce Michaud, “Dog-day misery in Aisle 16”, in North of Tampa, St. Petersburg Times, page 2. From the entry code brown
  • Its forums are swollen with refugees of various online worlds, all with harrowing stories of runaway gaming habits, lives ruined, friends lost, marriages broken.2003 April 3, David McCandless, “Just one more go…”, in The Guardian. From the entry heroinware
  • He used the phrases like you people and your people when talking about who would suffer the most from economic problems and runaway crime.2001, Kenneth S. Bordens, Irwin A. Horowitz, Social Psychology, page 120. From the entry you people
  • This bad practice may be followed for years before the runaway follows, but that it will eventually is "as sure as death and taxes."1907, F.B. Farmer, Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen's Magazine, volume 43, A Dangerous Air Brake Practice, page 59. From the entry sure as death and taxes
  • Vaporwave arose in reaction to huge economic and social forces that are still very much a part of our lives: globalization, runaway consumerism, and manufactured nostalgia chief among them.2016 August 18, “How Vaporwave Was Created Then Destroyed by the Internet”, in Esquire, archived from the original on 22 Apr 2019. From the entry vaporwave

Meaning of runaway

  1. noun A person or animal that runs away or has run away; a person, animal, or organization that escapes captivity or restrictions.
  2. noun A vehicle (especially, a train) that is out of control.
  3. noun An object or process that is out of control or out of equilibrium.

Full definition of runaway

Questions about runaway in a sentence

How do you use runaway in a sentence?
Runaway is used as a noun and adjective. For example: “Runaways are vulnerable to criminal exploitation.”
What is a short sentence with runaway?
“a runaway donkey”
What does runaway mean?
Runaway means a person or animal that runs away or has run away; a person, animal, or organization that escapes captivity or restrictions.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: runaway (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this page: “How to use runaway in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/runaway. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.