Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A course of violent, frenzied behavior or action.
  • intransitive verb To move about wildly or violently.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A leaping or jumping about, as from anger or excitement; violent or furious movement; excited action of any kind: as, to be on the rampage; to go on a rampage.
  • To act or move in a ramping manner; spring or rush violently; rage or storm about.
  • To run or prance about; move springily or friskily; romp; riot.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun Prov. or Low Violent or riotous behavior; a state of excitement, passion, or debauchery.
  • intransitive verb Prov. or Low To leap or prance about, as an animal; to be violent; to rage.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A course of violent, frenzied action.
  • verb To move about wildly or violently

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • verb act violently, recklessly, or destructively
  • noun violently angry and destructive behavior

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Scots, possibly from ramp.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle English ramp ("rave, rush wildly about"), from Old French ramper.

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Examples

Comments

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  • I rampaged that rampage into another rampage.

    October 9, 2015

  • I have a problem with the word "rampage" I feel that it is used and overused due to a lack of vocabulary by most people. It's usually only used to describe mass violence such as shootings. Anyone care to chime in?

    January 22, 2020

  • oh I don't know about that. If anything, its more hackneyed usage is as a colloquial hyperbolic reference to a period of expression of anger, with no real violence implied (see Twitter cites). While yes rampage is probably the frontrunner for instances of actual mass violence, nearly as often we see bloodbath, spree, massacre, slaughter, jag and others.

    January 23, 2020

  • @ry Perhaps you're right. I don't subscribe to Twitter, otherwise I'd be able to check it out. It's kind of like "crash and burn" except that crash is the impact word and "burn" that implies no recovery> But they're hardly used independently.

    January 23, 2020

  • Twitter citations are on the right side of this page.

    January 25, 2020