🏃 To leave quickly 🚫 To drive away 💧 To flow away 🖨️ To make copies 🏅 To hold a tiebreaker

to run off

1 5.6

Hold a second vote or match between top candidates to decide the winner

phrasal verb
/rʌn ɔf/

: celebrar una ronda de desempate

After the main voting concluded, they organized a run off to choose between the leading teams.
run off elections

Examples

To determine the winner, they will run off a second vote for the mayoral candidates.
(3) make those primaries open, so that all voters could pick among all candidates, choosing the pair in each race who would run off in the fall.

Blog text (1)
Matt Kuchar ran off four straight birdies as he and Dustin Johnson built an early lead against Rose and Martin Kaymer.

Blog text (7)
The committee decided to run off the final election between the top two candidates next week.

Antonyms

cancel

1.0

No longer planned or scheduled

Surface Forms

run off infinitive

running off present participle

runs off third person singular

ran off past

ran off past participle

Morphology

run + off

The printing sense is tangentially related to 'run' (as in operating a machine or producing copies) but the particle 'off' does not transparently contribute the specific meaning of 'make copies'. A B1 learner who knows 'run' and 'off' might guess an action involving a machine from context but would not reliably derive the specialized photocopying sense, so this is partially compositional but not fully predictable.

Etymology

Run off for contests comes from the idea of making the top competitors do a short extra event 'off' to find the winner, like making tied runners compete again. So it means 'to hold a second contest' to decide the result.