Drove

How to spell drove

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce drove

What does drove mean?

1. verbThe past tense of 'drive': operated or travelled in a vehicle, or forced something to move or happen.
2. nounA herd of animals being moved along a road, or a large moving crowd of people.

Drove in a sentence

• verb

  She drove to the airport before dawn to beat the traffic.

• noun

  A drove of cattle blocked the narrow country lane for an hour.

• verb

  The rising rent drove many small shops out of the high street.

• noun

  Visitors arrived in a steady drove once the gates opened.

Where does drove come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Drove is the old past tense of the verb 'drive', which descends from the Old English drīfan, meaning 'to push, urge, or force something forward'. Old English verbs of this strong class formed their past tense by changing the vowel rather than adding an ending, so drīfan became drāf, which smoothed into the modern 'drove'; this is the same pattern that gives us 'ride/rode' and 'write/wrote'. The noun sense, meaning a herd of animals being moved along a road, comes from the closely related Old English noun drāf, literally 'something that is driven'. From the idea of a moving herd, English speakers extended 'droves' to mean a large crowd of people moving together, a usage that was common by the 1600s. The Germanic root sits behind related words across the family, including the Dutch 'drijven' and the German 'treiben', both meaning to drive or push.

How the word is built

• drov- (Old English drāf, past stem of drīfan 'to drive')
• -e