Learn English – the difference between “run over” and “run under” in the context of car accident

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In a post in Straight Dope Message Board, run over and run under are used in car accident context, but I can't differentiate them. In my understanding, in both cases the victim is hit directly by the vehicle's front, no wheel runs over the body. I cannot google out an example of run under in the context of car accident (only thrown under the bus, but this is irrelevant).

So what is the difference between run over and run under?

When hit by a car, the vast majority of people are not run over; they are run under. The lower legs break, sending them into the air. They usually strike the hood of the car, often with the back of the head impacting the windshield, "starring" the windshield, possibly leaving a few hairs in the glass. They then go over the top of the car. They are still alive, although with broken legs, and maybe with head pain from the nonfatal windshield impact. They die when they hit the ground. They die from head injury.

A person hit by a bus would actually be run over. There would be two separate sets of injury. The first would be when the kinetic energy of the bus struck the pedestrian. Mass times velocity squared. This is the closest approximation to the ground that your example offers. The likelihood is that they would incur lots of fractures, but not be killed by simple impact. If they were killed, the injury I have seen most often, in my autopsies as a medical examiner, is rib fractures, with the free ends of the ribs bending inward at the moment of impact, to perforate heart and lungs. This is a vanishingly rare injury in fatal falls.

By the way, what is go over the top of the car?

Best Answer

"Run under" is not an established expression: this writer has invented it, to make the point that most victims of an accident end up above the car, not under it.

If this idea gets picked up, it may become an established expression; but at present, if you used the phrase without this context, people would probably not understand you.

Edit: Roger Willcocks points out in a comment that the phrase has had some use, so I went looking on the NOW corpus.

  • "[BE] run over" occurs 3311 times
  • "[BE] run under" occurs 528 times. But on looking through the pages, I failed to find a single instance of "run under" in this sense: most of them are something like "the project was run under such-and-such conditions". I'm not saying there are no instances, but there are certainly very few in that corpus. (The one instance I found that I thought at first was pertinent was "I don't feel as if I've been run under a bus," as a simile in an article about the Russian doping scandal. While the speaker might have had this expression in mind, I rather doubt it, thinking that he has conflated "been run over" and "been under a bus".

The NOW corpus, by the way, has 2.5 billion entries, and is taken from Web news, 2010-yesterday.

I stand by my answer above.

Further edit: For comparison, I looked at some of the instances of "[BE] run over". The first twenty "was run over" were all in the road accident sense; but in the first twenty "be run over", only 11 of them were in the road accident sense. So the 3311 figure should be reduced somewhat ("was run over" was the largest group in the output, having 1353 out of the 3311 instances). But we still have conservatively, 2000 instances of "run over" to at most a handful of "run under".

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