strike
Pronunciation change
Verb change
|
Plain form |
Third-person singular |
Past tense |
Past participle |
Present participle |
- (transitive) When you hit something, you strike it.
- When an idea strikes you, it occurs to you suddenly or with force.
- When a clock rings a bell to tell you the time, the clock strikes the time.
|
Plain form |
Third-person singular |
Past tense |
Past participle |
Present participle |
- A disease can strike a person. That person is stricken with disease.
- The child was stricken with a serious blood disease.
- When you strike a part from a document, it is stricken from the document.
- The errors were stricken from the dictionary.
- When bad luck strikes you, you are stricken with bad luck.
Usage notes change
Most of the time the past participle of “strike” is “struck.” The exceptions are that you can be stricken with guilt, a misfortune, a wound or a disease; and a passage in a document can be stricken out. The rest of the time, stick with “struck.” This rule does not seem to be authoritative. The past participle is stricken.
When dealing with the verb "to strike" in a labour union context, the use of the past participle "struck" sounds awkward at best, and is confusing. If you write "the union struck three times since the 1970s" the reader is left to wonder "struck what?- a deal? or something else?". In such situations the use of one of the following locutions is most often used: "went on strike", "took strike action" to express the simple past.