Driven

How to spell driven

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce driven

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does driven mean?

1. verbThe past participle of 'drive': to have operated a vehicle, or to have been pushed or forced along.
2. adjectiveRelentlessly motivated, ambitious, or determined to achieve a goal.

Driven in a sentence

• verb

  By the time she arrived she had driven for nearly seven hours.

• adjective

  He is a deeply driven entrepreneur who rarely takes a day off.

• verb

  The rental car had been driven carelessly by the previous customer.

• adjective

  The whole sales team is driven to hit its annual target.

Where does driven come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past participle of the verb 'drive', which descends from the Old English drīfan, meaning 'to push, force, or urge forward', whether livestock, an enemy, or an object. The strong verb pattern of Old and Middle English, where the past participle took an '-en' ending and the vowel shifted, is exactly why we say 'driven' rather than 'drived'; the same pattern gives us 'written', 'ridden', and 'risen'. The original sense was about herding or forcing something to move, and over centuries it broadened to cover steering vehicles, powering machinery, and figuratively, propelling a person through ambition. By the time of motor cars the word naturally extended to operating them, and the adjective sense of a 'driven' person, relentlessly motivated, became common in the twentieth century. The spelling trap is the single 'v' and the unstressed '-en' that sounds like '-in', tempting writers toward 'drivin'.

How the word is built

• driv- (from drive, Old English drīfan)
• -en (past participle suffix)