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PlainSpell

runs

/ɹʌnz/noun, verb

runs is a noun meaning “Diarrhea/diarrhoea” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled R-U-N-S and has one syllable, and it appears 69 times per million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data).

What does runs mean?

noun

  1. 1

    slangDiarrhea/diarrhoea.

    He missed several days of school because he had the runs. They think it was a Norovirus infection.

  2. 2

    plural of run (a form of run)

verb

  1. 1

    third-person singular simple present indicative of run (a form of run)

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce runs?

  • /ɹʌnz/

Runs has one syllable (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-us-runs.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

How common is runs?

Runs appears 69 times per million words in written English, the 1,528th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Runs in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense diarrhea:

LanguageWords
Frenchcourante, chiasse

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does runs come from?

Usually said to allude to the fact that an affected person is frequently running to get to a toilet immediately. Sometimes said to allude to the runniness (runny consistency) of the stool.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).