题型：阅读理解 题类：常考题 难易度：普通
黑龙江省哈尔滨市第六中学2017-2018学年高一上学期英语期中考试试卷
Oxford English Dictionary editors recently said that "run" has become the word with the most meanings in English, with more than 645 different usage cases for the verb form alone. This entry(条目), took one professional dictionary writer nine months of research to complete. How could three little letters be responsible for so many meanings?
Think about it: When you run a fever, for example, those three letters have a different meaning than when you run a bath to treat it, or when your bathwater runs over and makes your bath runner wet, forcing you to run out to the store and buy a new one. There, you run up a bill of $85 because besides a small carpet and some cold medicine, you also need some thread to fix the run in your stockings and some tissue for your runny nose and a carton of milk because you've run through your supply at home, and all this makes fear run through your soul because your value club membership runs out at the end of the month and you've already run over your budget on last week's grocery run when you ran over a nail and now your car won't even run properly. God—you'd do things differently if you ran the world.
When the OED's first edition came out in 1928, the longest entry belonged to another three letter word: "set". Today, it has some 200 meanings.
Why is "run" suddenly the Swiss Army Knife of verbs? According to British author Simon Winchester, "run" has earned some major lift during the Industrial Revolution (工业革命), when new inventions chose it as their verb of choice. "Machines run, clocks run, computers run there are all of those that began in the middle of the 19th century," Winchester says.
So, ready to run through the whole list of definitions(定义)? You'll have to wait for the next edition of the OED, expected in 2037.
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