Drive

How to spell drive

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce drive

What does drive mean?

1. verbTo operate and steer a motor vehicle.
2. nounA journey or outing made in a vehicle.
3. nounDetermination, energy, and ambition to achieve something.
4. nounA device or unit in a computer that stores or reads data.

Drive in a sentence

• verb

  She had to drive for three hours to reach the airport.

• noun

  The cottage is a short drive from the motorway.

• noun

  Her ambition and drive helped her finish the project ahead of schedule.

• noun

  He backed up the files to an external drive before reformatting the laptop.

• verb

  Learning to drive a manual car takes a little practice.

• noun

  They took a scenic drive along the coast on Sunday.

Where does drive come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Drive comes from the Old English verb drīfan, which meant to push, urge, force, or compel something to move onward, often used of driving cattle or being driven by wind. It belongs to a wide family of Germanic relatives, including Dutch drijven and German treiben, all carrying that same core idea of forcing forward motion. For most of its history the word described herding animals or pushing things along, and only with the arrival of carriages and then motor vehicles did the modern sense of steering and operating a vehicle take hold. The noun senses grew naturally from the verb: a journey one is driven on, an inner push or energy that drives a person, and much later the computing sense of a device that moves data. The spelling is refreshingly regular, with the long i marked by the silent final e, so the chief thing to remember is simply that single e on the end.

How the word is built

• drive (from Old English drīfan: to push or urge forward)