This morning I woke up with a question: Why do we say that water runs, but it never walks or crawls? Instead it runs slowly, or it drips?
It ends up this is a peculiarity of English. In researching this, Merriam-Webster surprisingly has ‘running water’ as a noun. It’s two words, an adjective and a noun, but they went with making it a noun which demonstrates how steeped it has become in the English language. It also states that the first use of it was in 1856.
It doesn’t say where. Well, how do we know that then? To quote Wikipedia, “Citation Needed“.
I got this far with Perplexity.AI, which I use sometimes for research – I’m not paying for it (yet? $20 a month is steep). Since I had a hint that it was considered a noun, I checked Etymonline and found nothing of use there.
When I checked Oxford English Dictionary about ‘running water’, it claimed that the earliest known use of the phrase was in the Old English period, before 1150. That’s about 700 years earlier than Merriam-Webster claimed. Oxford offered to give me the etymology, if only I subscribed. I did try registering to see how much that would cost, but those folks in Oxford had other plans.
I’m not sure how I acted suspiciously. Maybe there is a conspiracy about ‘running water’ – a coverup? I sincerely doubt that.
Paywalling the source of running water is… mildly amusing. They dammed the flow of information. So punny.
I ended up looking up the Old English etymology, and ended up with ‘ea‘.
So, in all of this, I haven’t really answered the question which is dissatisfying. It’s a simple enough question, one that I have thought about off and on for about half a century. Perplexity.AI couldn’t find it because humans who wrote for websites didn’t write it, or paywalled the answer.
It’s just another English oddity. Remember that the next time you run past a dripping faucet, or are running next to running water.
Meanwhile, electricity flows, but motors run. Go figure.
If anyone has answers, I’d love to hear what they are. If you found this trying to research it, hopefully more content can be found on it when you are looking – please let me know in a comment.
My husband asked this question and I didn’t have a satisfactory answer so in researching came across this post…
The best I can say is that the verb “run” has meant both “move more quickly than walking” (when referring to people / animals) _and_ “flow” (at any speed, when referring to a liquid) all the way back in its etymology to Proto-Indo-European. Beyond that we’d have to speculate, but it seems quite possible that it had the second meaning *before* the first one.
That is, I would conjecture that we call fast-walking “running” because it means “moving like liquid” rather than the other way around.