ran

1. 1
   verb

   Past tense of run.

   Floodwaters ran through the streets after the storm.

   He ran the family business for nearly thirty years.

   Note

   A past formed by changing the vowel rather than adding -ed: run becomes ran, but the participle goes back to run (she has run). Ran works intransitively (the water ran) and transitively (she ran the course, he ran the business). Putting it after have is the nonstandard participle, which is common in speech but avoided in edited writing.

2. 2
   verbnonstandard

   Past participle of run. This use is nonstandard; standard English uses "run" after have, has or had.

   He has ran that trail so many times he knows every turn.

   We had ran the whole way home before the rain caught us.

   Note

   The participle that standard English spells run, leveled to match the past tense: have ran, had ran. It is not a recent slip. Samuel Chandler's 1731 translation of Limborch has "you have ran into an Error," and Helen Summer's Running Crazy (2012) writes "I've ran this event many times." It still marks speech, so in edited prose write have run.

3. 3
   verbdialectal

   Past tense of rin, a dialect form of run.

   Note

   A dialect verb whose past matches the standard one: rin, a dialectal form of run, also takes ran. In the past tense the two are indistinguishable on the page, and only the present shows the dialect (they rin home). The spelling rin also names a former Japanese coin worth a thousandth of a yen. That coin is an unrelated noun with no past tense.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   Yarn coiled and stored on a spun-yarn winch aboard a ship.

   Like yarn wound onto a bobbin, scaled up for a ship's rigging.

   The rigger drew the ran off the winch as he worked.

   Coils of ran lay ready in the rope locker.

   Note

   A rigger's word, separate in origin from the past tense it shares a spelling with. Ran is spun yarn already wound on the spun-yarn winch, the shipboard apparatus that twists yarns for serving rope and making small stuff. It is uncountable, so sailors speak of coils of ran or a length of ran, never of rans.

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