Definition of run (or make) rings round (or around) someone in English:

phrase

• Outclass or outwit someone very easily.

  ‘I had to be very firm with her, or she'd have run rings round me’

  More example sentences

  • ‘It's also why big corporations, with their bureaucratic structures, often find small businesses running rings around them.’
  • ‘With so much experience down the years, I can usually run rings around them.’
  • ‘He had a reputation as an intellectual lightweight, and a wife who could apparently run rings around him, Barbara, who ran a small but commercially very successful art gallery a short walk from their Hampstead home.’
  • ‘It was wet, it was a freezing afternoon and Kildare collapsed to a Mayo team that ran rings around us in Newbridge.’
  • ‘Huntley replied: ‘I wouldn't say I was running rings round them.’’
  • ‘She looked like she was running rings round him in there.’
  • ‘We have got to do more because the criminals are running rings around us.’
  • ‘While he is playing the game of coalition politics, Labour are running rings around him.’
  • ‘The result, says MacDonald, was that the prisoners ran rings round them.’
  • ‘They have been naïve and allowed our European partners to run rings around us.’

  Synonyms

  surpass, outshine, outclass, overshadow, eclipse, exceed, excel, transcend, cap, top, outstrip, outdo, put to shame, make look pale by comparison, put in the shade, be better than, beat, outplay, outperform, upstage, dwarf

  View synonyms