Stride

How to spell stride

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce stride

What does stride mean?

1. verbTo walk with long, decisive steps.
2. nounA single long step, or the manner and length of someone's steps.

Stride in a sentence

• verb

  He would stride across the office to greet every new client.

• noun

  The runner lengthened her stride on the final straight.

• verb

  She likes to stride briskly to the station each morning.

• noun

  He covered the hallway in one confident stride.

Where does stride come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Stride comes from the Old English verb strīdan, which meant to straddle or to set the legs wide apart, and by extension to walk with long, sweeping steps. The word belongs to a small group of West Germanic relatives, including the Dutch and Low German strijden, though those cousins drifted toward the meaning of striving or quarrelling rather than walking. The shared underlying idea seems to have been a forceful spreading or contention of the limbs, which is why straddling and striding sit so close together. In English the sense of long, confident steps won out and stayed remarkably stable for over a thousand years. The familiar figurative phrases, such as taking something in one's stride or making great strides, grew naturally out of that physical image of steady, ground-covering steps. Because the word is short and follows the regular silent-e pattern of ride and bride, its spelling rarely troubles adult writers.

How the word is built

• stride (from Old English strīdan: to straddle, to walk with long steps); single root, no affixes