Striving

How to spell striving

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce striving

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does striving mean?

1. verbMaking great and determined efforts to achieve something.

Striving in a sentence

• The company is striving to cut its costs before the next quarter.

• She spent the year striving for a promotion at work.

Where does striving come from?

Language of origin: French

This is the present participle of 'strive', which English borrowed from the Old French verb 'estriver', meaning 'to quarrel, contend, or compete'. That French word came from the noun 'estrif', meaning 'strife' or 'a struggle', which was itself of Germanic origin, tied to the same family of words that gave us 'strife'. English took it up in the thirteenth century, when it still carried a strong flavour of fighting or contention before softening into the modern sense of making earnest, sustained effort toward a goal. The spelling trap sits in the suffix: when '-ing' is added, the silent 'e' of 'strive' is dropped, so the word keeps a single 'v' and never an 'e' before the ending. Its close relatives 'strive' and 'strife' still preserve the original notion of a hard, contested push.

How the word is built

• striv- (from strive: to make great effort)
• -ing (present participle / gerund suffix)