a. and adv.; also amock, amok. [ad. Malay amoq adj., ‘engaging furiously in battle, attacking with desperate resolution, rushing in a state of frenzy to the commission of indiscriminate murder…. Applied to any animal in a state of vicious rage’; Marsden, Malay Dict. Cf. AMOK(E v.]
1. orig. adj. or sb. A name for a frenzied Malay. (Found first in Pg. form amouco, amuco.)
[c. 1516. Barbosa, transl. by Ld. Stanley (Hakl. Soc., 1866), 194. There are some of them [the Javanese] who … go out into the streets, and kill as many persons as they meet … These are called Amuco.]
1663. H. Cogan, Pinto’s Trav., I. 199. That all those which were able to bear arms should make themselves Amoucos, that is to say, men resolved either to dye, or vanquish. Ibid., lxiv. 260. These same are ordinarily called Amucos.
1772. Cook, Voy. (1790), I. 288. To run amock is to get drunk with opium … to sally forth from the house, kill the person or persons supposed to have injured the Amock, and any other person that attempts to impede his passage.
2. To run amuck: to run viciously, mad, frenzied for blood. (Here amuck was orig. adj.)
1672. Marvell, Reh. Transp., I. 59. Like a raging Indian … he runs a mucke (as they cal it there) stabbing every man he meets.
1772. Cook, Voy. (1790), I. 289. Jealousy of the women is the usual reason of these poor creatures running amock (or amuck).
1833. Southey, Nav. Hist. Eng., I. 21. The same pitch of fury which the Malays excite in themselves by a deleterious drug, before they run amuck.
1858. Gen. Thompson, Audi Alt. Part., I. xxii. 81. If the laborious ox … was seen … running amuck and sending man, woman and child to the hospital by dint of horn or hoof.
1879. L. Lindsay, Mind in Lower An., 45. Thus the running amok (or amuck) … is a peculiar form of human insanity.
3. fig. Wild or wildly, headlong or heedlessly. (Very rarely with any other verb than run.) Const. on, at, against (with, of).
1689. Hickeringill, Modest Inq., i. 2. Running a Muck at all Mankind.
1735. Pope, Hor. Sat., II. i. 70. I’m too discreet To run a muck, and tilt at all I meet.
1827. Hare, Guess. Tr., Ser. I. (1873), 259. If we could banish our wits to grin amuck with savages and monkies.
1859. Thoreau, Walden, viii. (1863), 186. I might have run ‘amok’ against society, but I preferred that society should run ‘amok’ against me.
1870. Disraeli, Lothair, xxx. 145. Ready to run a muck with any one who crossed him.
1880. W. R. Smith, in Manch. Guard., 29 Oct. In their alarm they were determined to run amuck of everything.
¶ It has been erroneously treated as muck sb.
1687. Dryden, Hind & P., III. 1188. And runs an Indian muck at all he meets.
1824. Byron, Don Juan, X. lxix. Thy waiters running mucks at every bell.
