Striker

How to spell striker

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce striker

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does striker mean?

1. nounAn attacking player whose main role is to score goals.
2. nounA worker who is taking part in a strike by refusing to work.
3. nounA part of a device or weapon that strikes another component to make it work.

Striker in a sentence

• The club signed a new striker to boost their goal tally.

• Each striker stood on the picket line outside the factory gates.

• When you pull the trigger, the striker hits the primer and the round fires.

• As the team's main striker, she scored twice before half time.

• The company refused to negotiate with any striker until the walkout ended.

• The old clock's striker tapped the bell every hour.

Where does striker come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built from the verb strike plus the agent ending -er, so it literally names someone or something that strikes. Strike itself descends from the Old English strican, which originally meant to stroke, rub, or move smoothly across a surface rather than to deliver a blow; the related German streichen still carries that gentler sense of stroking or spreading. Over the medieval period the English meaning hardened from stroking into hitting and dealing blows, and by the nineteenth century strike had also taken on the industrial sense of workers downing tools, since they were said to strike the work. The noun striker followed each of these turns, naming a hitting part of a machine, then a worker who joins a strike, and finally an attacking player whose job is to strike the ball at goal. The spelling keeps the silent e of strike hidden, because adding -er drops it: strike plus er gives strik(e)er, a small reason the doubled or single letters can trip a writer.

How the word is built

• strike (Old English strican: to stroke, move, hit)
• -er (agent suffix: one who does)