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vocabulary
1000+ books

amok
in a sentence

show 46 more with this conextual meaning
  • We watch the kids run amok around us.†   (source)
  • They had more or less run amuck and were dam- ming up rivers and flooding highways, filling pastures, even beginning to invade the cities.†   (source)
  • Okay, so here's the general rule: whether it's Italy or Greece or Africa or Malaysia or Vietnam, when writers send characters south, it's so they can run amok.†   (source)
  • After 9/11, he and Kathy knew that many imaginations had run amok, that the introduction of the idea of "sleeper cells"—groups of would-be terrorists living in the U.S. and waiting, for years or decades, to strike—meant that everyone at their mosque, or the entire mosque itself, might be waiting for instructions from their presumed leaders in the hills of Afghanistan or Pakistan.†   (source)
  • He would not allow three men from ancient times to run amok in the modern world for centuries.†   (source)
  • Twenty minutes later they came surging out, about three hundred kids, babbling, gleeful, casually amuck.†   (source)
  • He's thinking that he can't keep the people on his side if the troops are running amok among the civilian population—raping the women, stealing cattle, burning houses.†   (source)
  • We walked through bare halls, and peered into sparsely furnished rooms, as unwashed and unsupervised children ran amok.†   (source)
  • Another said she probably didn't like saddle shoes and when she got out of the loony bin and walked four hundred miles to safety, the first thing she saw was a kid wearing saddle shoes and she couldn't take it—ran amok.†   (source)
  • Especially with some kind of…of beasts running amok in the streets!†   (source)
  • …air two miles high on an inch or two of metal, sustained from death by the meager skill and intelligence of two vapid strangers, a beardless kid named Huple and a nervous nut like Dobbs, who really did go nuts right there in the plane, running amuck over the target without leaving his copilot's seat and grabbing the controls from Huple to plunge them all down into that chilling dive that tore Yossarian's headset loose and brought them right back inside the dense flak from which they…†   (source)
  • They want them removed because they believe that it's really possible to conjure up evil and that kids who read this stuff might accidentally inspire Satan to run amok in our town.†   (source)
  • I could see no option three, so I hoped it was the second option and this was just my subconscious running amuck, rather than something I would need to be hospitalized for.†   (source)
  • Such a being is a metaphysical monstrosity, struggling to oppose, negate and contradict the fact of his own existence, running blindly amuck on a trail of destruction, capable of nothing but pain.†   (source)
  • Large numbers of police officers in yellow rain slickers were on duty, because a Puerto Rican parade a few years before had ended in a riot when youths ran amok in Central Park, harassing and groping women.†   (source)
  • These were the people of the colored forest gone amuck.†   (source)
  • What is this I hear about carriage drivers gone amok in the streets of London?†   (source)
  • Having been since age 7 rigidly instructed in an eschatology that pointed nowhere but to a presidency and death, trained to do absolutely nothing but sign his name to specialized memoranda he could not begin to understand and to take blame for the running-amok of specialized programs that failed for specialized reasons he had to have explained to him, the executives first thoughts were naturally of suicide.†   (source)
  • Although even as a child in Poland' she had heard of the blazing marvel of the New England foliage in October, Nathan had fueled her expectation, describing the landscape she was about to see in his delicious, extravagant way and telling her that this singularly American spectacle, this amok flambeau unique in all Nature, was simply an aesthetic encounter that must not be missed.†   (source)
  • He leapt and bounded around the billabong with the abandon of a dervish run amok.†   (source)
  • But he might run amuck any minute.†   (source)
  • The crowd moved outside, where loudly and profanely they attacked the stolid immovability of a system run amuck.†   (source)
  • the procurement process gone amok
  • A part of him — the part closest to his throbbing right ear — was quite keen on the idea of letting Ron down and watching him run amok until the effects of the potion wore off … but on the other hand, they were supposed to be friends, Ron had not been himself when he had attacked, and Harry— thought that he would deserve another punching if he permitted Ron to declare undying love for Romilda Vane.†   (source)
  • We might add, if we're being generous, that they run amok because they are having direct, raw encounters with the subconscious.†   (source)
  • She didn't run amok!" shouted Hermione.†   (source)
  • The unhinged fling of an arm, the right arm whippy and haywire, like a part that runs amuck in a machine, and the whole body spasm, an arrhythmic thing, a thing outside the limits of experience.†   (source)
  • So they want to make it look like you're starving your workers …. and the workers are running amuck and you're unable to control them …. and the government's got to step in for your own protection and for public safety ….†   (source)
  • Old man Lipton dye him up some shredded New York Times and put it in a cute little white bag and northern Negroes run amok.†   (source)
  • He'll not run amok in my 'ouse!"†   (source)
  • He knew that the specific reason behind the Plan was Orren Boyle; he knew that the working of an intricate mechanism, operated by pull, threat, pressure, blackmail-a mechanism like an irrational adding machine run amuck and throwing up any chance sum at the whim of any moment-had happened to add up to Boyle's pressure upon these men to extort for him this last piece of plunder.†   (source)
  • I got so sick of it I thought I'd run amuck and bash somebody's skull.†   (source)
  • Just call me when one of your new journalists runs amuck more than usual.†   (source)
  • A blind mass running amuck, to crush you without sense or purpose.†   (source)
  • I'm like a savage who's discovered the idea of private property and run amuck on it.†   (source)
  • Now, in our age, collectivism, the rule of the second-hander and second-rater, the ancient monster, has broken loose and is running amuck.†   (source)
  • One night at a resort called Cedar Point, he got into a fight and ran amuck like a wild thing.†   (source)
  • So it was with the CASSANDRA, as brought us all safe home from Malabar, after England took the viceroy of the Indies; so it was with the old WALRUS, Flint's old ship, as I've seen amuck with the red blood and fit to sink with gold."†   (source)
  • …told that, rough and brutal as they seemed just then, they were not like this all the year round, but were, in fact, quite civil persons save during certain weeks of autumn and winter, when, like the inhabitants of the Malay Peninsula, they ran amuck, and made it their purpose to destroy life—in this case harmless feathered creatures, brought into being by artificial means solely to gratify these propensities—at once so unmannerly and so unchivalrous towards their weaker fellows in…†   (source)
  • You say that convention is all that really keeps you straight in this "woman proposition"; but it's more than that, Amory; it's the fear that what you begin you can't stop; you would run amuck, and I know whereof I speak; it's that half-miraculous sixth sense by which you detect evil, it's the half-realized fear of God in your heart.†   (source)
  • Sometimes, in the haste of speeding-up, they would dump one of the animals out on the floor before it was fully stunned, and it would get upon its feet and run amuck.†   (source)
  • …that had last hailed him, and maddened by his long entombment in a place as black as the bowels of despair; it was then that Steelkilt proposed to the two Canallers, thus far apparently of one mind with him, to burst out of their hole at the next summoning of the garrison; and armed with their keen mincing knives (long, crescentic, heavy implements with a handle at each end) run amuck from the bowsprit to the taffrail; and if by any devilishness of desperation possible, seize the ship.†   (source)
  • I want you to get word to the king that I am a magician myself—and the Supreme Grand High-yu-Muck-amuck and head of the tribe, at that; and I want him to be made to understand that I am just quietly arranging a little calamity here that will make the fur fly in these realms if Sir Kay's project is carried out and any harm comes to me.†   (source)
  • It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run "amok" against society; but I preferred that society should run "amok" against me, it being the desperate party.†   (source)
  • Don't run amok!†   (source)
  • And, says Mr Dixon, if ever he got scent of a cattleraider in Roscommon or the wilds of Connemara or a husbandman in Sligo that was sowing as much as a handful of mustard or a bag of rapeseed out he'd run amok over half the countryside rooting up with his horns whatever was planted and all by lord Harry's orders.†   (source)
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