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strike

From Wiktionary
strike is one of the 1000 most common headwords.
street - strike - strong

Pronunciation

[change]

Verb

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Plain form
strike

Third-person singular
strikes

Past tense
struck

Past participle
struck

Present participle
striking

  1. (transitive) When you hit something, you strike it.
    If you strike a person, it will hurt.
    He struck the boy with his hand.
  2. When an idea strikes you, it occurs to you suddenly or with force.
    To play with fire strikes me as a bad idea.
  3. When a clock rings a bell to tell you the time, the clock strikes the time.
    The children ran out of the school when the clock struck twelve.

Plain form
strike

Third-person singular
strikes

Past tense
struck

Past participle
stricken

Present participle
striking

  1. A disease can strike a person. That person is stricken with disease.
    The child was stricken with a serious blood disease.
  2. When you strike a part from a document, it is stricken from the document.
    The errors were stricken from the dictionary.
  3. When bad luck strikes you, you are stricken with bad luck.

Usage notes

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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.

Noun

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Singular
strike

Plural
strikes

  1. (countable) When a group of people stop working to improve or defend their working conditions or pay, they go on strike.
    Every secretary at the company went on strike for better pay.