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Careen and Career
Some people might be confused by the warning to not confuse careen and career, because the most common sense of career ("a profession") is not much like any of the meanings of careen. But when employed as a verb, career does have some semantic overlap with careen; both words may be used to mean "to go at top speed especially in a headlong manner." A car, for instance, may either careen or career. Some usage guides hold, however, that the car is only careening if there is side-to-side motion, as careen has other meanings related to movement, among which is "to sway from side to side."
Examples of careen in a Sentence
Hannah Parry, MSNBC Newsweek, 4 Sep. 2025
Eyewitnesses reported seeing one of the railway’s two cars derailing and careening down the street before hitting a building.
—Catherine Nicholls, CNN Money, 4 Sep. 2025
Of their 26 games, 20 are against teams with winning records while three are against the pesky Marlins and three are against the careening Nationals.
—Larry Fleisher, Forbes.com, 1 Sep. 2025
That corpse and everything pertaining to it turns into the film’s Achille’s heel, producing a hazy mystery that gets lost amid the chaos of careening and colliding side stories.
—Randy Myers, Mercury News, 30 Aug. 2025
See All Example Sentences for careen
Cite this Entry
“Careen.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/careen. Accessed 10 Sep. 2025.
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