runner

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

• noun Sports One who runs, as for exercise or in a race.
• noun Baseball One who runs the bases.
• noun Football One who carries the ball.
• noun A fugitive.
• noun One who carries messages or runs errands.
• noun One who serves as an agent or collector, as for a bank or brokerage house.
• noun One who solicits business, as for a hotel or store.
• noun A smuggler.
• noun A vessel engaged in smuggling.
• noun One who operates or manages something.
• noun A device in or on which something slides or moves, as.
• noun The blade of a skate.
• noun The supports on which a drawer slides.
• noun A long narrow carpet.
• noun A long narrow tablecloth.
• noun Metallurgy A channel along which molten metal is poured into a mold; a gate.
• noun A twining bean plant, such as the scarlet runner.
• noun Either of two fast-swimming marine fishes of the family Carangidae, the blue runner (Caranx crysos) of Atlantic waters, or the rainbow runner (Elagatis bipinnulata) of tropical and subtropical waters worldwide.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun One who or that which runs.
• noun One who is in the act of running, as in any game or sport.
• noun One who frequents or runs habitually to a place.
• noun A runaway; a fugitive; a deserter.
• noun One who risks or evades dangers, impediments, or legal restrictions, as in blockade-running or smuggling; especially, a smuggler.
• noun An operator or manager, as of an engine or a machine.
• noun One who goes about on any sort of errand; a messenger; specifically, in Great Britain and in the courts of China, a sheriff's officer; a bailiff; in the United States, one whose business it is to solicit passengers for railways, steamboats, etc.
• noun A commercial traveler. [U. S.]
• noun A running stream; a run.
• noun plural In ornithology, specifically, the Cursores or Brevipennes.
• noun plural In entomology, specifically, the cursorial orthopterous insects; the cockroaches. See Cursoria.
• noun A carangoid fish, the leather-jacket, Elagatis pinnulatus.
• noun In botany, a slender prostrate stem, having a bud at the end which sends out leaves and roots, as in the strawberry; also, a plant that spreads by such creeping stems. Compare run, intransitive verb, 10.
• noun In machinery: The tight pulley of a system of fast-and-loose pulleys
• noun In a grinding-mill, the stone which is turned, in distinction from the fixed stone, or bedstone. See cuts under mill, 1.
• noun In a system of pulleys, a block which moves, as distinguished from a block which is held in a fixed position. Also called running block. See cut under pulley.
• noun A single rope rove through a movable block, having an cye or thimble in the end of which a tackle is hooked.
• noun In saddlery, a loop of metal, leather, bone, celluloid, ivory, or other material, through which a running or sliding strap or rein is passed: as, the runners for the gag-rein on the throat-latch of a bridle or head-stall.
• noun In optical-instrument making, a convex cast-iron support for lenses, used in shaping them by grinding.
• noun That part of anything on which it runs or slides: as, the runner or keel of a sleigh or a skate.
• noun In molding: A channel cut in the sand of a mold to allow molted metal to run from the furnace to the space to be filled in the mold.
• noun The small mass of metal left in this channel, which shows, when the mold is removed, as a projection from the casting. See jet, 4 .
• noun In bookbinding, the front board of the plow-press, used in cutting edges.
• noun plural In printing: The friction-rollers in the ribs of a printing-press, on which the bed slides to and from impression.
• noun A line of corks put on a form of type to prevent the inking-rollers from sagging, and over-coloring the types.