1 [C] a wooden or metal bar placed around sth as a barrier or to provide support:
She leaned on the ship's rail and gazed out to sea.
seealsoGUARDRAIL, HANDRAIL
2 [C] a bar fixed to the wall for hanging things on:
a picture / curtain / towel rail
3 [C,usually pl.] each of the two metal bars that form the track that trains run on
4 [U] (often before another noun) railways/railroads as a means of transport:
to travel / send sth by rail * rail travel / services / fares * a rail link / network
IDIOMS
go off the rails (BrE, informal)
1 to start behaving in a strange or unacceptable manner, for example, drinking a lot or taking drugs:
She went completely off the rails after her sister died.
2 to lose control and stop functioning correctly:
The company has gone badly off the rails in recent years.
get back on the rails (informal) to become successful again after a period of failure, or to begin functioning normally again:
He has helped get the company back on the rails again.
moreatJUMPv.
verb ~ (at / against sth/sb) (formal) to complain about sth/sb in a very angry way: [V] She railed against the injustice of it all. [also Vspeech]
PHRASALVERBS
rail sth in / off to separate an area or object from others by placing rails around it:
The machine was railed off as a safety precaution.
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for rail is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is rail a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, rail is tagged as noun.
Does rail appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — rail appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
