I'm late for the party, and when I turn up after half an hour my friend says, "Where have you been?" Now, can I reply, "I overran my class by half an hour"? I'm not sure if it is common in American English. Actually, according to some dictionaries, the verb "overrun" is usually used in British English:
(BRITISH) to take more time, space, or money than was intended
(Macmillan Dictionary)
Does it mean that in my context "overrun" is not that much common in American English? If so, are there any alternatives?
Best Answer
No, I can understand what is meant, but would find this strange. I would say "my class ran over by half an hour" instead. "Overrun" can be used as a noun, though ("the project was criticized for its substantial cost overruns," for instance).
A friend in the comments suggests that this may not be representative of typical American use. It seems difficult to prove a negative, but absent other information I honestly would have assumed someone saying "my class overran by two hours" did not speak English as a first language. As perhaps a representative corpus of American English, here are example sentences for the word "overrun" offered by Dictionary.com. This tool is not sophisticated enough to distinguish between different senses or parts of speech, but just gives us various sentences that use the word at all, so I think it's a reasonable metric for us to use:
They give more examples, but I stopped here. There is "overrun" the verb, meaning to overwhelm, overfill, and so on, there is "overrun" the noun, meaning an instance of something running over in budget, schedule, and so on. "Overrun" in time, as a synonym of "run over," does not appear in any of the examples. You may be able to find some usage of the phrase in this way in American English, but I would consider it exceedingly rare, and a cursory attempt to verify does nothing to challenge my impression.